The Wisdom Chronicle is designed to bring nuggets of wisdom from the dozens of books I read every year. I endeavor to share the best of what I have gleaned. The determination of relevance lies with you.  Blessings, Jim Whiddon

251. OBEDIENCE “Judas heard all Christ’s sermons.” That’s a quote from Thomas Goodwin, and I find it chilling. Think on that for a moment. Judas heard every sermon our Lord preached. He was an eyewitness of every miracle. But he never obeyed; he never yielded on the inside.”

Excerpt From: Farrar, Steve. “True Courage.”

252. OPPORTUNITY “The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”

— John Burroughs

253. CRISIS PREVENTION “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”

— John F. Kennedy

254. COMMITTEES “The unwilling picked from the unfit to do the unnecessary.”

Excerpt From: Michael O’Malley, Ph.D. “The Wisdom of Bees.”

255. CHILDREN “When children are young, give them roots; when they grow, give them wings.”

— Unknown

256. CONFUCIUS “When you are joyful, do not make promises; when you are angry, do not mail a letter.”

257. MANHOOD “The first false idea about manhood is the idea of being macho—of being a big shot and using strength to be domineering and to bully those who are weaker. Obviously this is not God’s idea of what a real man is. It’s someone who has not grown up emotionally, who might be a man on the outside, but who on the inside is simply an insecure and selfish boy. The second false choice is to be emasculated—to essentially turn away from your masculinity and to pretend that there is no real difference between men and women. Your strength as a man has no purpose, so being strong isn’t even a good God’s idea of manhood is something else entirely: God’s idea of making men strong was so that they would use that strength to protect women and children and anyone else. There’s something heroic in that. Male strength is a gift from God, and like all gifts from God, it’s always and everywhere meant to be used to bless others.”

Excerpt From: Metaxas, Eric. “Seven Men.”

258. WAITING “We tend to think that if God is really engaged, He will change things within the next hour or so. Certainly by sundown. Absolutely by the end of the week. But God is not a slave to the human clock. Compared to the works of mankind, He is extremely deliberate and painfully slow. As religious poet George Herbert wisely penned, “God’s mill grinds slow, but sure.” . . .”

Excerpt From: Charles R. Swindoll. “Wisdom for the Way.”

259. NATIONAL DECLINE “We can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. His reply? “I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: Don’t do what you are doing now.”

Excerpt From: Krauthammer, Charles. “Things That Matter.”

260. GOD’S PHONE “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” JEREMIAH 33:3 God’s phone number. The line is never busy. Your call never goes to voice mail. He always answers—and He answers in a way that far exceeds our most optimistic expectations (Ephesians 3:20).

Excerpt From: O. S. Hawkins. “The Joshua Code.”

There can only be a purpose for sex if there is a purpose for life, which means that sex (or any other activity) can only have ultimate meaning if God exists.  If there is no God, then all of life is ultimately meaningless.

Since God exists, the main purpose of sex is to bond a man and woman together to procreate and raise children.  But isn’t pleasure a purpose for sex?  Certainly, the Bible speaks highly of sexual pleasure (see the Song of Solomon).  But the pleasure we experience during sex encourages us to bond with one another and procreate.  In other words, pleasure is more the result than the purpose.  If pleasure is the primary purpose of sex– not bonding or procreating– then we would have to say that pleasure should be pursued even if it harms.  Professor J. Budziszewski explains in this conversation excerpted from his book Ask Me Anything.

“The main point of Christian sexual morality is that human nature is designed. We need to live a certain way because we’re designed to live that way.”

“Then let’s start with the heart. Do you see how every part works together toward its purpose, its function?”

“Sure. You’ve got nerves and valves and pumping chambers, all for moving blood.”

“Right. If you think about the sexual powers instead of the heart, it’s just the same. The key to understanding a design is to recognize its purposes. For the heart, the purpose is pumping blood; for the sexual powers—you tell me.”
“Pleasure?”

“Think about it. Would you say pleasure is the purpose of eating?”

“No, I’d say nourishment is the purpose of eating, and pleasure is just the result.”

“If you thought pleasure was the purpose of eating, what would you do if I offered you pleasant-tasting poison?”

“Eat it.”

“And what would happen?”

“I’d get sick.”

“But if you understood that nourishment is the purpose of eating and pleasure merely the result, then what would you do if I offered you pleasant-tasting poison?”

“Refuse it and ask for food instead.”

“It’s the same with the sexual powers. Pleasure is a result of their use, but it’s not the purpose of their use. The purposes can tell you which kinds of sexual activity are good and which aren’t; by itself, pleasure can’t. The inbuilt purpose of the sexual powers is to bond a man with a woman and the other is to have and raise children.”  (HT: Jim Whiddon)

In the third installment of the Indiana Jones movie series, The Last Crusade, “Indy” goes to the chalkboard in his tweed jacket and writes down the word “FACT” and underlines it. Then he says to his eager listening students:

Archaeology is the search for fact not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.”

“Indy” in the classroom.

Unbeknownst to most people, “Indy” was summarizing a philosophical outlook, not an archaeological one! That outlook, reaches all the way back to the 18th Century and the European Enlightenment from a German philosopher named, Immanuel Kant.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Kant was responsible for the radical separation of facts from truth (or values).[1] The question is, is “Indy” right? Was Kant right? Should ‘facts’ be divorced from truth? Are the two mutually exclusive? Is truth merely from someone’s perspective? How should truth be defined? Furthermore, why does this even matter? It matters because ideas have consequences! Truth by its very nature is absolute and unbreakable. Truth is that which corresponds to reality.

If Bible-believing Christians adopt the philosophical viewpoint of Kant and “Indy,” it would have devastating consequences on their faith. It is, however, is the viewpoint of Israeli archaeologist Amon Ben Tor. Ben Tor is representative of most archaeologists working in Israel and the Levant, and articulates a view of facts and values that is in directly line with Immanuel Kant [& Dr. Jones].

 This intense urge to prove the Bible cannot affect the pious believer. For such a person, the scriptures contain their own truth and need not be criticized or proven. This need is prevalent, in what must be construed as an irrational manner, among large sections of the secular public, which find it important that the archaeologists prove that all the events in the Bible did indeed occur and that all the figures mentioned and the episodes described are entirely consistent with reality. There is in this demand a violation of archaeological integrity and an attempt to impose upon archaeology unattainable objectives that is the proof of faith.[2]

Ben-Tor states that the Scriptures “contain their own truth,” as if there were a separation between what the Bible says and the facts of reality. When Ben-Tor and other scholars make statements of skepticism towards the Bible, it is not a conclusion from archaeology, rather it is an outworking of an underlying philosophy and world-view to which they adhere.

Not every statement by an archaeologist or historian is a statement of archaeology or history.

The judgments by Ben-Tor are philosophical in nature. The particular philosophical viewpoint he articulates actually has a name, and it is called fideism. Fideism is the belief that faith, by itself apart from any evidence, is what is most important for the Christian.

Sadly, many Christians today have adopted this definition of faith which is actually not Biblical at all. All too often when young people have questions about their faith or the Bible, they are told by their parents, “Just believe!” or “Just have faith!” When these same young people get to college and they are challenged by their atheistic professors, they have no answers. What are they to place their faith in? What are the reasons for their faith? The writer of Hebrews states: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”[3] Faith is not blind, it has an object, and faith is only as good as its object.

F.F. Bruce strongly reinforces this point in his great little book, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?

For the Christian gospel is not primarily a code of ethics or a metaphysical system; it is first and foremost good news, and as such it was proclaimed by its earliest preachers. True, they called Christianity ‘The Way’ and ‘The Life’; but Christianity as a way of life depends upon the acceptance of Christianity as good news. And this good news is intimately bound up with the historical order, for it tells how for the world’s redemption God entered into history, the eternal came into time, the kingdom of heaven invaded the realm of earth, the great events of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.[4]

The object of our faith is the real, historical person of Jesus Christ, and the historical reality [the truth] of His resurrection, mitigated to us through a historical document called the Bible.

Indiana Jones may have separated facts from truth, but the Bible does not. If there was not a historical, bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead then our preaching is useless and our faith is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:13-17).

[1] See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillian, 1929). The terms that Kant used were the ‘phenomena’ and the ‘noumena.’ He believed that the only true knowledge that we have access to, is the ‘noumena’ or what he called the ‘noumenal world’ which exists only in our minds. The phenomena (or things as they are) are separated in our minds by a great “gulf,” hence the “fact-value dichotomy.”

[2] Amon Ben-Tor, Editor, The Archaeology of Ancient Israel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992)[Introduction], 9 [emphasis mine].

[3] Hebrews 11:1 (NKJV) [emphasis mine].

[4] F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Leicester, England: InterVarsity Press, 1997, Fifth Revised Edition), pp.7-8 [emphasis mine].

On this blog we have often talked about the same sex marriage controversy and how it poses a threat to both religious liberty and the family unit. However, the elephant in the room that is rarely publicly discussed in evangelical circles is pornography, an evil that arguably poses just as much threat (if not a bigger threat) to the family unit. A 2008 study of 813 college students from six different college campuses participated in a survey [1]. Of young men aged between 18 and 26, a whopping 86% admitted to having viewed pornography in the past year. 48.4% admitted to viewing pornography on a weekly basis. 19.3% admitted to viewing pornography nearly every day. It is a popular myth that pornography is only a guy problem. But, of the young women in the same age range, 31% confessed to having viewed pornography in the last year, and 3.2% confessed to having viewed pornography on a weekly basis. What was particularly striking is that 67% of young men and 49% of young women believed that pornography use is acceptable, which means that many young men (87% of whom were users) were viewing pornography even though they regarded it as an unacceptable practice.

Pornography addiction is a plague upon the modern professing church, and while it is well and good to be criticizing the same sex marriage agenda, evangelicalism would do well to remove the plank from its own eye before removing the speck from another’s. Many within the church are willing to take a stand against the gay agenda, but how many are willing to examine their own hearts and deal with the elephant in the room that is pornography.

But what about church leaders? How are they fairing in keeping their minds pure? According to a 2002 survey of 1351 pastors, conducted by Rick Warren’s website Pastors.com, 54% confessed they had looked at online pornography within the past year and 30% of those had visited within the last 30 days. And that’s just the honest ones!

Many people don’t realize that there are some solid scientific reasons for thinking that the viewing of pornography is harmful to the brain. Pornography is not merely a moral issue, for it hard wires the brain in unhealthy ways. In this blog post, I am not going to present any moral or theological arguments for avoiding pornography — although there are plenty of those. Instead, I am simply going to look at the scientific facts and show why I think the behavior of viewing pornography is harmful, regardless of where you stand on issues of religion and ethics. Read more

The Wisdom Chronicle is designed to bring nuggets of wisdom from the dozens of books I read every year. I endeavor to share the best of what I have gleaned. The determination of relevance lies with you.  Blessings, Jim Whiddon

 241. WISDOM “Although we develop our intellect, wisdom is understanding God’s perspective on his world. God is the author of wisdom, and he delights in providing it. In fact, Ecclesiastes 2:26 tells us, “To the person who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God.”

Excerpt From: Harris, Raymond. “The Heart of Business.”

242. CHRISTIANS AND POLITICS Assertion: “It’s wrong to force your views on other people. You can’t legislate morality. Christians involved in politics violate the separation of church and state.” Response: “Do you vote? When you vote for someone, are you expecting your candidate to pass laws reflecting your own point of view? Wouldn’t that essentially be forcing your views on others? How is that different from what you’re troubled about here? Is it your view that only nonreligious people should be allowed to vote or participate in politics, or did I misunderstand you?

Where, specifically, in the Constitution are religious people excluded from the political process? Can you give me an example of legislation that does not have a moral element to it?”

Excerpt From: Koukl, Gregory. “Tactics.”

243. PARADOX “A paradox is truth standing on her head to get attention.”

— G. K. Chesterton

244. SECOND CHANCES “There will come a time in your life when you think everything is ending – but that will only be the beginning.”

— Louie Lamore

245. WINNERS “Winners employ “blue heat” because it lasts longer, burns hotter, and is more precise than a wild orange flame. Winners rarely talk about the bottom line, profitability, or even success. Rather, they talk about a greater purpose—and invite you to join them.”

Excerpt From: Luntz, Frank. “Win.”

246. SELF PITY “Most people don’t care about your problems, and the rest are glad you have them.”

— Coach Lou Holtz

247. DECISIONS “It is better to make a mediocre decision promptly rather than a perfect decision too late.”

— Col. (Ret.) Ralph Peters

248. BOTTOM LINE “A boss in my youth had a sign on the wall reading, “Don’t tell me about the storms at sea. Just tell me when the ship’s coming in.”

Excerpt From: Murray, Charles. “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead.”

249. ENTITLEMENT “Curmudgeons think that the twenty-somethings’ good opinion of themselves is especially inflated among graduates of elite colleges. Here’s what he CEO of a large corporation said to me when the topic came up: “We don’t even recruit at Harvard or Princeton anymore. We want kids from places like Southeastern Oklahoma State who have worked hard all their lives and share our values.”

Excerpt From: Murray, Charles. “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead.”

250. DEVIL “Make a deal with the devil, and maybe the devil will kill you last.”

Excerpt From: Gutfeld, Greg. “Not Cool.”

The Wisdom Chronicle is designed to bring nuggets of wisdom from the dozens of books I read every year. I endeavor to share the best of what I have gleaned. The determination of relevance lies with you.  Blessings, Jim Whiddon

231. GOD’S ECONOMY “In the world’s economy people are defined by what they have accomplished. In God’s economy, they are defined by who they have become as a result of God’s transformation of their hearts. God values what we bring to heaven, not the material wealth and possessions we leave on earth.”

Excerpt From: Harris, Raymond. “The Heart of Business.”

232. GLOBAL POVERTY “There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous: It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed.”

Excerpt From: Peter Greer, Chris Horst & Anna Haggard. “Mission Drift.”

233. BIBLE NOT AUTHENTIC? Assertion: “You can’t take the Bible too seriously because it was only written by men, and men make mistakes. Response: Do you have any books in your library? Were those books written by humans? Do you find any truth in them? Is there a reason you think the Bible is less truthful or reliable than other books you own? Do people always make mistakes in what they write? Do you think that if God did exist, he would be capable of using humans to write down exactly what he wants?”

Excerpt From: Koukl, Gregory. “Tactics.”

234. DEATH BY MINNOWS “Getting eaten by a whale or nibbled to death by minnows results in the same thing, although one demise is typically more difficult to diagnose.”

–Steve Haas

235. SOCIAL MEDIA “Defined as linking all human life on the planet into one gigantic brainstem throbbing with unintelligible thought.”

— Stanley Bing

236. PARENTING “Good parenting, from my perspective, is like building a three-foot retaining wall against a four-foot wave. The kids have to make up that extra foot. That wave wants to drag them into an undertow where sound judgment is suspended, where the valueless, uncaring, and ultimately nihilistic cool reigns. In other words, where the Kardashians are royalty.”

Excerpt From: Gutfeld, Greg. “Not Cool.”

237. GOVT HANDOUTS “[A] misguided view of charity has replaced real charity. As our government pretends to offer handouts, it’s really just spreading the wealth around, without wondering where that wealth has come from. In the end, redistribution kills ambition, saps the energy that fuels the American dream, and makes all of us poorer each passing day. Our consciousness may be raised, but our options for wealth and success dwindle.”

Excerpt From: Gutfeld, Greg. “Not Cool.”

238. DEATH AND TAXES “It might be comforting to think that when the Earth that nourish’d thee…claim[s] thy growth, thy tax dollars will have gone toward planting the tree thou fertilize’th.”

— 17th century American poet William Cullen Bryant

239. RULES Rules without relationship = rebellion.

— Josh McDowell

240. SEX EDUCATION “We should not be ashamed to discuss that which God was not ashamed to create.”

— Howard Hendricks

The fine structure constant could easily be larger, the photon massive, quarks heavier, or even worse, electrons, photons, or quarks might not [exist] .. Any one of these would be enough to eliminate our presence.[1]” Physicist Leonard Susskind

This blog is yet another installment in a series on how the fine-tuning of the universe for life provides evidence for God. Here are other blogs in the series:

Intro/Philosophical Background

If You Don’t Want God, You Better Have a Multiverse!

How Does Fine-tuning Provide Evidence for God?

Objections

Mistaken Objections that Seek to Trivialize Fine-Tuning

Important Objections in the Fine-Tuning Debate

But We Can’t Even Define Life

Evidence

Fine-Tuning of Initial Conditions to Support Life

Many Changes to the Laws of Physics Would be Life-Prohibiting

Fine-Tuning of the Force Strengths to Permit Life

This blog examines how hard it is to get the right type of building blocks to support intelligent life. Not just any types of particles suffice – no scientist speculates about photon-based life or neutrino-based life since there would be no way to store or replicate information[2]. Consider that every second you have about 65 billion neutrinos passing through the tip of your finger, and at night solar neutrinos travel unaffected through the entire earth before going through your fingertip. The only plausible forms of advanced life that could originate anywhere in the universe are based on atoms. You might think that the mass of a particle doesn’t really matter that much. It’s easy to envision ourselves being composed of protons or electrons or quarks of a different mass. But this turns out to be quite mistaken. The mass of particles is very important in determining their longevity, their suitability in sustaining nuclear reactions in stars, and their suitability for chemistry. In this blog, I’ll once again be extensively utilizing Luke Barnes excellent fine-tuning article as a resource, but I’ll also refer to writings of leading physicists such as Leonard Susskind, Stephen Hawking and Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek.

In order to have evidence that life-permitting physics is a small subset among possibilities we must have some idea of the range of possibilities. In this context, we’re on pretty firm ground. There is a maximum mass for particles as set by the Planck scale. The current concept of mass would become incoherent if particles could exceed the so-called Planck mass. The Standard Model provides a means of computing quantum corrections that affect masses, resulting in a natural scale for particle masses. Let’s examine whether or not the mass of certain particles has to be finely-tuned to support life.

The Masses of the Electron and the Proton

If protons were 0.2 percent heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms.[3]” Hawking in Grand Design

For this data, I’d like to show you a graph from Barnes’s review article[4] with notes about the various life-permitting constraints.

ParticleMassDiagram2

Credit: Luke Barnes Review Article

Notes About Diagram: The graph’s axes are scaled based on arctan(log10[x]) such that [0,∞] maps to a finite range. Refer to my previous blog for a more detailed explanation of coupling constants but basically these are just the dimensionless fundamental constants that convey the strength of the fundamental forces. Here is some notation used in the descriptions of the life-permitting criteria:

α – the electromagnetic coupling constant (also referred to as the fine-structure constant)

αs – the coupling constant for the strong nuclear force

β – the ratio of the mass of an electron to the mass of a proton

The tiny life-permitting region has to simultaneous satisfy each of the following life-permitting criteria and our universe’s values are at the ‘+’ sign near the lower left:

1) For hydrogen to exist the mass of an electron must be less than the difference in the masses of a neutron and a proton else the electron would be captured by the proton to form a neutron. Without hydrogen, there would be no water and no long-lived stars (e.g. Helium stars burn out 30 times faster).

2) Atoms are only stable if radius of an electron orbit is significantly greater than the size of the nucleus – this depends on the ratio of the electron and proton masses such that αβ/αs < 1/1000.

3) The energy scale for chemical reactions should be much smaller than that for nuclear reactions. Otherwise, information could not be stably stored because the type of elements in molecules would be changing because chemical identity would not be maintained. This requires the ratio of the electron and proton masses to be finely-tuned such that α2β/αs2 < 1/1000.

4) Unless the fourth root of β is less than about 1/3, molecular structures would be unstable. They would basically be continually melting and thus disrupting the ability to store information.

5) The stability of the proton requires the electromagnetic coupling constant to be less than the difference of the masses of the down quark and up quark divided by a constant. This enables the extra electromagnetic mass-energy of a proton relative to a neutron to be counter-balanced by the bare quark masses.

6) This fine-tuning is related to the electromagnetic coupling constant and was covered in my previous blog.

7) Stars will not be stable unless β > 0.01 α2

Note that life-permitting criteria 2-5 and 7 also depend on one or more coupling constants and thus reinforces my previous arguments about the difficulties in getting simultaneous solutions to so many independent equations. There are also some additional constraints on the masses of the proton and electron not necessarily shown in Barnes’s diagram:

  • A constraint on the main nuclear reaction in stars. This depends on a finely-tuned strong nuclear force strength as previously mentioned but also depends on a particular relationship of the masses of the up and down quarks and the electron.
  • The ratio of the mass of the electron to the proton also affects the ability of stars to output photons at energy levels that break chemical bonds (this was also referenced in my previous blog because it also depended on force strengths). The dashed line in the diagram represents that constraint.
  • The mass of the electron and proton also show up in the equation for the cosmological parameter Q as described in my previous blog.

These tight constraints on the life-permitting region for the mass of the electron are even more surprising because the values are deemed “unnaturally low” to begin with. Barnes elucidates this issue: “There are, then, two independent ways in which the masses of the basic constituents of matter are surprisingly small … the Hierarchy Problem … and the flavour problem. … The electron mass is unnaturally smaller than its (unnaturally small) natural scale set by the Higgs condensate.[5]” These are called problems simply because they require fine-tuning – the values they take on are quite different than the natural scale. It’s possible that new physics discoveries might minimize the unnaturalness somewhat but the life-permitting ranges are so tight that there is no basis for assuming that the fine-tuning will go away.

There is also a tight constraint on the charge of the electron. The electromagnetic coupling constant can be expressed in terms of a ratio involving the square of the charge of an electron. Thus, the numerous constraints referenced in my previous blog can also be viewed as a dependence on the charge of the electron. Thus, consider again the fine-tuning necessary for the production of carbon and oxygen in stars. This required fine-tuning of the electromagnetic coupling constant to 1 part in 10,000. Thus, another way of looking at this is that if the electron differed in charge by more than 1 part in 100,000,000 in either direction then the universe would basically be devoid of carbon or oxygen or both.

In order to understand more details about the mass of the proton, a little background will be helpful. A proton is comprised of 2 up quarks and a down quark and a neutron is comprised of 2 down quarks and an up quark. Most of the mass of these composite particles is derived not from the quarks but from the energy due to the strong force that is constraining them. This binding energy is equivalent to mass as per Einstein’s famous equation: E=mc2. Thus, we should also examine the sensitivity of the quark masses.

Quark Masses

“[T]he up- and down-quarks are absurdly light. The fact that they are roughly twenty thousand times lighter than particles like the Z-boson . . . needs an explanation. The Standard Model has not provided one. Thus, we can ask what the world would be like if the up- and down-quarks were much heavier than they are. Once again – disaster![6] Leonard Susskind

The mass of the quarks is derived from the Higgs boson but the other approximately 98% of the proton and neutron mass is based on the binding energy of the strong nuclear force. Quark masses vary from roughly 10 to 344,000 times the mass of the electron and thus if the masses of the up and down quarks only support life within narrow ranges relative to possible quark masses, this constitutes a high degree of fine-tuning. Research into the physics literature reveals very widespread agreement that these quark masses are finely-tuned. Barnes cites at least 7 physics articles arguing for this conclusion. Physicist Craig Hogan affirms this conclusion: “Changing the quark masses even a small amount has drastic consequences for which no amount of Darwinian selection can compensate.” Hogan reminds us that fine-tuning deals with what has to happen before any biological evolution could get started.

Barr and Khan’s article considers the 60+ orders of magnitude in the space of possible up and down quark masses and document 9 different life-permitting criteria that end up constraining the life-permitting region to a tiny subset in the space of possibilities. I conservatively measured the improbability off their graph as no more than 3 parts in 1036 – this makes it less likely than picking out one red grain of sand in a giant sand pile in Eurasia up to the height of the moon (to harken back to my analogy from a previous blog).

Most of these criteria are very clear cut disasters for life of any kind – for example there are constraints necessary to have stable protons, neutrons and atoms, and there are a couple of disasters where only one type of long-lived particle would exist with the chemistry of either hydrogen or helium.

Other particles

Atoms, molecules and life are entirely dependent on the curious fact that the photon has no mass.[7]” Susskind

Susskind goes on to explain that no life could exist if the photon had even a tiny mass because otherwise electromagnetic force acts at too limited of a range for chemistry to be operative. The Higgs Boson has been in the news lately since it was discovered recently at the LHC. Luke Barnes documents how, in natural Planck units, the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs Boson must be between 4e-17 and 2e-14. He cites 4 different articles and multiple finely-tuned criteria.[8]

Even the mass of neutrinos turns out to require fine-tuning to support life. Tegmark, Vilenking and Pogosian argue that if the sum of the mass of the 3 species exceeds just 1 electron volt then no galaxies would exist. They refer to this as an anthropic constraint so they seem convinced that life couldn’t form if there were no galaxies, presumably since galaxies are critical for star formation. This constraint is significant since neutrino masses are so tiny compared to other particles. For example, the top quark is 170 billion times more massive than this!

Will New Physics Rescue Us From the Need for All of These Fine-Tunings?

Physicist Craig Hogan argues that the “two light quark masses and one coupling constant are ultimately determined even in the `Final Theory’ by a choice from a large or continuous ensemble… the correct unification scheme will not allow calculation of [the masses of the proton and the up and down quarks] from first principles alone.” So these parameters have a large range of choices and a small life-permitting range and there is no good reason to expect a ‘Theory of Everything’ to force these masses to their current values. We should remember that even if this were the case, there would still be a fine-tuning argument based on what is metaphysically possible. Physicists would still be astounded at the coincidences: “Even if all apparently anthropic coincidences could be explained [in terms of a more fundamental theory], it would still be remarkable that the relationships dictated by physical theory happened also to be those propitious for life.[9]” Bernard Carr and Sir Martin Rees

Actually, grand unified field theories and other new more fundamental physics theories introduce new fine-tuning requirements. Most of these theories assume something called supersymmetry is true. However, if supersymmetry were true at our energy scales, there would be no life anywhere in the universe as Susskind has pointed out[10]. In this unconfirmed theory, every particle has a partner particle of the opposite type – bosons have partners that are fermions and vice versa. Thankfully, even if supersymmetry turns out to be true, it’s a broken symmetry at low-energies! Barnes also points out that the Grand Unified Theories provide “tightest anthropic bounds on the fine structure constant, associated with the decay of the proton into a positron and the requirement of grand unification below the Planck scale.[11]” So these new candidate theories do not eliminate fine-tuning.

If you’ve been following my fine-tuning blog series, I hope by now you see the incestuous nature of the inter-dependencies and inter-connections of finely-tuned parameters and how incredible it is that there is a solution to all of the concurrent equations that must satisfy multiple, entirely independent life-permitting constraints. Consider that if you have 10 linear equations and 10 “unknown” variables then there is usually at least 1 solution to all of the equations. This becomes increasingly unlikely is as you add non-linear terms or as you reduce the number of variables. Thus, if new physics reduces the number of variables (the fundamental constants) that makes it more surprising that a simultaneous solution exists to all of the life-permitting criteria!

Can the Multiverse Explain this Fine-Tuning?

Recall our discussion about how the multiverse, if it is to explain fine-tuning, predicts that the fine-tuning will be barely enough to be life-permitting. As physicist Paul Davies notes: “there is no a priori reason why the laws of physics should be more bio-friendly than is strictly necessary for observers to arise.” Davies also says that “the observed Universe is not minimally biophilic, and many scientists seem to think it is actually optimally biophilic.” I think he must be referring to the laws of physics and not necessarily all aspects of the universe being optimally biophilic.

Do we have indications from the fine-tuning of particle attributes that they are fine-tuned more than is strictly necessary to support life? Stephen Hawking seems to think so: “The summed quark masses seem roughly optimized for the existence of the largest number of stable nuclei.[12]” Many of these heavier elements are not essential to what would minimally count as a living observer but are important for technology and lead to a more bio-friendly universe. Multiverse theories generally entail new physics that predicts that protons decay. No one has yet seen such an event despite extensive attempts that allow us to compute a maximum possible proton decay rate. This decay rate turns out to be much greater than that predicted by the multiverse proposals. Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek of MIT indicates that the lifetime of the proton is at least 10 orders of magnitude greater than necessary – this corresponds to a factor of ten billion.

Physicist Lee Smolin critiques multiverse theories because they fail to make predictions consistent with our universe. He notes that “there are constants that simply don’t have the values we would expect them to have if they were chosen by random distribution among a population of possibly true universes.[13]” Smolin points out the unexpected and unlikely relationship between quark and lepton masses. He further argues that under randomly varying laws, “some symmetries of elementary particles would be violated by the strong nuclear force much more than they are.[14]”

Another powerful example of fine-tuning that goes beyond what is strictly necessary for life can be seen in the properties of water. A 2011 article[15] from New Scientist highlighted research by scientists from Stanford and the Argonne National Lab:

“Water’s life-giving properties exist on a knife-edge. It turns out that life as we know it relies on a fortuitous, but incredibly delicate, balance of quantum forces. Water is one of the planet’s weirdest liquids, and many of its most bizarre features make it life-giving.” Consider just a few of the examples of the bio-friendly properties of water that are exceptional compared to other liquids:

  • Higher density as liquid than solid (ice floats)

– Prevents lakes from freezing bottom up

– Ice at top then acts as a much better insulator than water to minimize additional freezing

  • Very high heat capacity

–  Moderates temperatures at global and organismal levels

  • Latent heat of evaporation by far higher than other substances

– Increased ability to cool organisms

– Water’s unusually high thermal conductivity for a liquid also aids in cooling

  • Unusually high surface tension

– Maximizes capillary action

  • Low viscosity increase rate of diffusion, recycling of nutrients globally, and allows tiny capillaries (3 micron, single-cell thick wall) to nourish muscles
  • Non-Newtonian fluid

–  2x increase in pressure leads to 3x rate of (blood) flow

  • Viscosity of ice maximizes glacial activity
  • Near universal solvent – great for transport within cells or recycling nutrients within an ecosystem

The article explains that fine-tuning was needed for water to have such properties: “computer simulations show that quantum mechanics nearly robbed water of these life-giving features… Water fortuitously has two quantum effects which cancel each other out… ” The article concludes: “We are used to the idea that the cosmos’s physical constants are fine-tuned for life. Now it seems water’s quantum forces can be added to this ‘just right’ list’.” The parameter at the most fundamental level that is finely-tuned is simply Planck’s constant since that affects the magnitude of the effects of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. However, recall that I mentioned previously that all of the force strengths have a term for Planck’s constant in them. Thus, Planck’s constant is independently highly constrained based on force strengths and yet this just happens to also result in water having all of these amazing and unusual properties that benefit life in a manner beyond what is explicable by multiverse theories.

An example of additional fine-tuning required under multiverse theories relates to the number of spatial dimensions. Theories that entail multiverses with differing parameters per universe generally predict additional spatial dimensions that have to be compactified if life is to exist because otherwise there would be neither stable atoms nor stable planetary orbits. A much more significant example of an additional fine-tuning is required by what seems to be the most popular multiverse theory, eternal inflation. I mentioned in an earlier blog but it’s worth repeating that Sean Carroll[16] and others have calculated that “inflation only occurs in a negligibly small fraction of cosmological histories, less than 10-66,000,000.” Thus, the multiverse isn’t very successful at explaining these finely-tuned parameters and the multiverse itself requires fine-tuning. The hypothesis of design therefore better explains the totality of the physics data.

 


[1] Leonard Susskind. The Cosmic Landscape, p. 176.

[2] As I’ve previously pointed, John von Neumann proved that information storage and replication are necessary for any type of life since life is a self-replicating system.

[3] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design, p. 160

[4] Barnes, p. 42-44.

[5] Barnes, p.48.

[6]Susskind, p. 176.

[7] Susskind, p. 174-5.

[8] Barnes, p. 44.

[9] Carr and Rees, “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle and the Structure of the Physical World,” Nature 278 (1979): 612.

[10] Susskind, p. 250. (The partner of the electron, the so-called selectron, would ruin chemistry.)

[11] Barnes, Luke. The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, p. 53. http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647

[12] Hawking and Mlodinow, p. 160.

[13] Lee Smolin. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, p. 166.

[14] Smolin, p. 167

[15] Lisa Grossman. “Water’s quantum weirdness makes life possible.” New Scientist. 25 Oct, 2011. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.900-waters-quantum-weirdness-makes-life-possible.html

[16]Carroll, Tam. Unitary Evolution and Cosmological Fine-Tuning. http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1417v1

The Wisdom Chronicle is designed to bring nuggets of wisdom from the dozens of books I read every year. I endeavor to share the best of what I have gleaned. The determination of relevance lies with you.  Blessings, Jim Whiddon

221. JUDGING RIGHTLY “Why is it that those who are the quickest to judge are often those in possession of the fewest facts?”

Excerpt From: Wooden, John. “Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court.”

222. ADVERSITY

“Looking back it seems to me,

All the grief that had to be

Left me when the pain was o’er

Stronger than I was before.”

—Unknown

223. PHYSICAL APPEARANCE Human self-image thrives on physical attractiveness, athletic ability, a worthwhile occupation. But, paradoxically, any of those desirable qualities may raise a barrier against the image of God, for virtually any quality that a person can rely on makes it more difficult for that person to rely on the spirit of God. The beautiful, the strong, the politically powerful, and the rich do not easily represent God’s image. Rather, God’s spirit shines most brightly through the frailty of the weak, the impotence of the poor, the deformity of the hunchback. Even as bodies are broken, God’s image can grow brighter.”

“I do not say that a Miss Universe or a handsome Olympian can never show forth the love and power of God, but I do believe that such a person is, in some ways, at a disadvantage. Talent, a pleasing physical appearance, and the adulation of crowds tend to shove aside the qualities of humility and selflessness and love that Christ demands of those who would bear his image.”

“Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight (Jeremiah 9:23 – 24).”

Excerpt From: Yancey, Philip. “In His Image.”

224. LONG TERM SUCCESS “Amos Alonzo Stagg. He was coaching football at the University of Chicago when they were a national power. After one very successful year a reporter said, “Coach Stagg, it was a great year! A really great year.”

Coach Stagg said, “I won’t know for another twenty years or so whether you’re correct.”

He meant that it would take that long to see how the youngsters under his supervision turned out in life.”

Excerpt From: Wooden, John. “Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court.”

225. TRY THIS IN A MEETING “Answer someone who expresses doubt about your idea with “Okay, let’s tweak it.” Now focus the argument on revising your idea as if the group had already accepted it. This move is a form of concession—rhetorical jujitsu that uses your opponent’s moves to your advantage.”

Excerpt From: Heinrichs, Jay. “Thank You For Arguing, Revised and Updated Edition.”

226. GOD SHAPES US “And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I don’t think it looks like a series of folded-over mistakes and do-overs that have shaped our lives. Instead, I think we’ll conclude in the end that maybe we’re all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better.”

Excerpt From: Goff, Bob. “Love Does.”

227. THE FUTURE “What is that key component and central question?

It’s simply this: Will you, or will you not, trust God for your future?”

Excerpt From: Farrar, Steve. “True Courage.”

228. JUSTICE “Blessed is the nation whose God is The Lord. Indeed I tremble for my country when I ponder that God is just and His justice cannot sleep forever.”

— Thomas Jefferson

229. COURAGE When given an opportunity to deny Christ and save his life: “There can be no deliberation in a matter so sacred.”

— early Christian Cyprian

230. CULTURE CLASH “Fault lines have shifted. As they move, we move, which is why all manner of clash is left behind.

In the end, the absence of clash becomes as telling as clash itself. In 1977, the year Queen Elizabeth II celebrated twenty-five years on the British throne, the Sex Pistols—remember them?—marked the occasion with the release of their dumb, if nasty, punk anthem “God Save the Queen,” prompting what were still predictable clucks of outrage from defenders of the British institution.

Given these seemingly natural cultural enmities, a golden jubilee invite to, for example, drug-addled, bleep-mouthed Ozzy Osbourne—at the time riding reality-show-high—should have struck a culturally significant spark or two somewhere in the realm. But no. As the aged Keeper of the Stiff Upper Lip and retinue prepared to receive the aging Advocate of Wild Abandon and mates at her own gala affair, there was no discernible tut-tutting, not a single letter to the editor wondering what the country was coming to. In the end, no one noted anything amiss about an event that brought together a man who bites bats with a woman who has a royal taster.

Which goes to show the cultural revolution isn’t just over; it’s been forgotten entirely. This explains why, flashing forward to the 2004 Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C., Billy Joel could celebrate Sir Elton John’s Lifetime Achievement Award by performing “The Bitch Is Back” for a black-tie crowd including President Bush, his White House cabinet, and a national television audience.

This was another transgressive moment of pomp and punkiness, a mix of cultivation and coarseness, but no one noticed the clash because there wasn’t any.”

Excerpt From: West, Diana. “The Death of the Grown-Up.”

“As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.[1]” Physicist Freeman Dyson

In my previous blog, I discussed how numerous changes to the laws of physics would have resulted in a lifeless universe. I admitted that this was relatively modest evidence for my fine-tuning claim:

“In the set of possible physical laws, parameters and initial conditions, the subset that permits rational conscious life is very small.”

I say relatively modest because the evidence I cite in my blog about the fine-tuning of initial conditions is so powerful and the same I argue applies to the evidence I present in this blog. This blog examines how the constants governing the four fundamental forces of physics must be finely-tuned to support life. Refer to my previous blog for the qualitative aspects of these forces and how they have to be just right to permit life. I now focus on the quantitative constraints on the strengths of these forces if intelligent life is to plausibly exist anywhere the universe. First some background – physicists typically refer to coupling constants for those dimensionless constants[2] which represent the strength of each force. The strength of these forces ranges over about 40 orders of magnitude – that is to say that the strongest force is 1040 times stronger than the weakest force. Thus, it would be surprising if the strengths of these forces must lie in narrow ranges to permit life – at least if the values were set at random such as would be the case in a universe without God. Let’s look at how sensitive these parameters are with respect to permitting life:

1)      Strong nuclear force

This force is important for the existence of stable atoms beyond hydrogen. If the strong force were 50% weaker, no elements used by life would exist because protons couldn’t be held together in the nucleus. The strong nuclear force must exceed the strength of the electromagnetic force sufficiently to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion of positively charged protons. While learning chemistry would be much easier if only the first few elements existed in the periodic table, there would be no physical creatures around to learn it! If the strong force were about 50% stronger no hydrogen would be left over from nuclear fusion processes occurring in the early universe. Hydrogen plays a critical life-supporting role not only as a constituent of water but hydrogen-burning stars last 30 times longer than alternatives. This particular constraint may not make intelligent life impossible but life would certainly be much harder to originate if the available time were so limited and if neither water nor hydrocarbons existed.

Also, hydrogen-bonding is very important in biology for many reasons: information storage in DNA, antibody-antigen interaction, and for the secondary structure of proteins. Remember that parameters that seem beneficial for life but are more fine-tuned than is strictly necessary counts against a multiverse explanation of the fine-tuning because multiverse scenarios predict only what is minimally necessary for life.[3] An even tighter constraint is that if the strong force were more than about 2% stronger protons wouldn’t form from quarks – in which case no chemical elements would exist![4] If the strong force were 9% weaker, stars would be unable to synthesize any elements heavier than deuterium (which is heavy hydrogen).

2)      Electromagnetic force

This force is responsible for chemistry and plays a critical role in stellar fusion which powers life. The electromagnetic force needs to be much weaker than the strong nuclear force for atoms to be stable – so that the radius of the electron orbit is much larger than the radius of the nucleus.[5] Unless the electromagnetic coupling constant (which represents its strength) is less than about 0.2, there would be no stable atoms because electrons orbiting the nucleus would have enough kinetic energetic to create electron-positron pairs which would then annihilate each other and produce photons. Additional examples of fine-tuning for this force strength will be described later in this blog.

3)      Weak nuclear force

The weak force controls proton-proton fusion, a reaction 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times slower than the nuclear reaction based on the strong nuclear force. Without this, “essentially all the matter in the universe would have been burned to helium before the first galaxies” were formed. Because the weak nuclear force is so much weaker than the strong nuclear force, a star can “burn its hydrogen gently for billions of years instead of blowing up like a bomb.[6]” I’ve previously described the negative ramifications for life if there were no hydrogen in the universe.

John Leslie points out several other ways in which the weak nuclear force is finely-tuned. “Had the weak force been appreciably stronger then the Big Bang’s nuclear burning would have proceeded past helium and all the way to iron. Fusion-powered stars would then be impossible.[7]”

Neutrinos interact only via the weak force and are just powerful enough to blast off outer layers of exploding stars but and just weak enough to pass through parts of the star to get there. The weak force also plays a role in fusing electrons and protons into neutrons during the core collapse of stars to keep the collapse proceeding until it becomes an exploding star (supernova). UK Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees estimated that a change in the strength of the weak nuclear force by about 1 part in at least 10,000 relative to the strength of the strong force would have prevented supernova explosions which allow heavier elements to find their way to planets.[8] Without these supernova explosions key heavy elements would be unavailable for life.

4)      Gravitational force

Many physicists think that we’ll eventually discover a Grand Unified Theory, uniting gravity with the other 3 fundamental forces. For this reason Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind remarks that “the properties of gravity, especially its strength, could easily have been different. In fact, it is an unexplained miracle that gravity is as weak as it is.[9]” This probable underlying relationship leads to a natural expectation that gravity could be as strong as the strongest force. The strength of gravity is about 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the strong nuclear force. Based on this expectation that gravity can vary up to strong nuclear force strength, the level of fine-tuning required for life is pretty remarkable:

  • If gravity is weaker by 1 in 1036, stars are unstable to degeneracy pressure (for small stars) or unstable to radiative pressure just expelling huge chunks of the star (for larger stars).
  • If gravity is stronger by 1 in 1040, the universe is dominated by black holes not stars.
  • If gravity is weaker by 1 in 1030, the largest planet that would avoid crushing effects of gravity on any large-brained creatures would have a radius of about 50 meters – which is not a good candidate for an ecosystem and the development/sustenance of intelligent life.

These are huge numbers that may be hard for most readers to visualize.  Thus, consider the following analogy to help understand the improbability of 1 part in 1036. Suppose one could make a sand pile encompassing all of Europe and Asia and up to 5 times the height of the moon.[10] Suppose one grain of sand is painted red and randomly placed somewhere within this pile. A blind-folded person then randomly selects one grain of sand from the pile. The odds that she would select that one red grain of sand are slightly better than the 1 in 1036 odds of a life-permitting strength of the gravitational force based on just one of the above criteria.

Let’s explore a few more fine-tuning cases constraining multiple constants concurrently.

Long-Lived Stars

As I’ve discussed previously, stars play at least two key roles in making the universe life-permitting:

1) As a long-lived power source that helps life overcome the effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that would otherwise lead to an eventual state of disarray and equilibrium.

2) For synthesizing elements not created by the Big Bang (which is basically everything past beryllium).

We take the sun for granted as a long-lived stable source of power but note the lack of any comparable long-lived power source on earth as an indication that is not always the case. A star is basically a controlled nuclear explosion held together by gravity – that it can last so long requires a delicate balance of various physical parameters. Consider that the Sun outputs less energy per kilogram of its mass than a person does – without fine-tuning, stars would die out much sooner. Obviously the sun is still able to output enormous quantities of energy because it’s so huge! Another surprising aspect of the sun is that photons generally take at least several thousand years to travel from the sun‘s core to its surface through the ionized plasma.[11] There are significant constraints on the strength of gravity and electromagnetism if there are to be long-lived stars. Luke Barnes summarizes some of the key physics research in this arena:

“There is a window of opportunity for stars – too small and they won’t be able to ignite and sustain nuclear fusion at their cores, being supported against gravity by degeneracy rather than thermal pressure; too large and radiation pressure will dominate over thermal pressure, allowing unstable pulsations.[12]”

Barnes does some calculations based on the possibility that gravity could vary in strength up to the strength of the strong nuclear force and uses a uniform prior distribution of possible values for the gravitational coupling constant and the electromagnetic coupling constant. Using this approach, he computes that “the stable-star-permitting region occupies 1038 of parameter space.” This is even less probable than my previous sand analogy!

Production of Both Carbon and Oxygen in Stars

One of the earliest examples of fine-tuning was discovered by astronomer Fred Hoyle with regard to the fine-tuning required to make both carbon and oxygen in stars. Three distinct coincidences are required to abundantly make both types of elements in stars. These restrictions impose a constraint of about 1 part in 250 on the relative strength of the strong force and the electromagnetic force in both directions. Actually a more recent study by Ekström[13] in 2010 indicated that a change of just 1 part in 10,000 in the electromagnetic coupling constant would have resulted in the inability of stars to synthesize both carbon and oxygen. Despite being an atheist Hoyle conceded:

“Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.[14]”

Other Constraints among Force Strengths

For a more comprehensive examination of fine-tuning constraints, refer to Luke Barnes excellent review article that I’ve previously referenced. This review article is an excellent summary of a hundred or so physics articles, and in many cases references multiple articles per fine-tuning constraint. Barnes lists several additional constraints I haven’t mentioned and provides additional details. Just among constraints involving powers of these coupling constants, Barnes lists a half dozen or more cases. Usually the power involves just a squared term but it’s important to note that there are linear, quadratic and inverse relationships among the coupling constants. For example, the electromagnetic force strength is constrained in one way based on a linear constraint and in another way based on a quadratic constraint and in another way based on the inverse of the force strength relative to some other constant. It is remarkable that there is a life-permitting region that simultaneously satisfied these multifaceted constraints.

Also, since each coupling constant can be expressed in terms of more fundamental parameters such as Planck’s constant and the speed of light there are very tight constraints on those parameters as well – especially because of the constraints across different powers of the coupling constant. Thus, Planck’s constant is constrained in one way and the square of this constant is constrained based on a different life-permitting criterion – and likewise for the speed of light.

Moreover, there is a finely-tuned cosmological parameter, known as Q, which can be expressed in terms of various other parameters including coupling constants. In an equation derived by Max Tegmark and Martin Rees[15], there are the following powers on various coupling constants: -1, 16/7, 4/7. Also, there is a natural log of the electromagnetic coupling constant to the -2 power that is taken to the -16/9 power. Without the various contributions of coupling constants taken to the various powers, the value for this parameter Q would not have been life-permitting. Q represents the magnitude of variations in energy density in the early universe. If Q was larger than 10-5 the universe would have consisted of too many black holes to be life-permitting. If Q were smaller than 10-6 there would be gravitationally bound structures in the universe – no stars, no planets and therefore no life. See Barnes’s article on page 32 for more details on the fine-tuning of Q and its relationship to coupling constants.

Finely-Tuned Output of Stellar Radiation

Brandon Carter first discovered a remarkable relationship among the gravitational and electromagnetic coupling constants. If the 12th power of the electromagnetic strength were not proportional to the gravitational coupling constant then the photons produced by stars would not be of the right energy level to interact with chemistry and thus to support photosynthesis. Note how sensitive a proportion has to be when it involves the 12th power – a doubling of the electromagnetic force strength would have required an increase in the gravitational strength by a factor of 4096 in order to maintain the right proportion. Harnessing light energy through chemical means seems to be possible only in universes where this condition holds. If this is not strictly necessary for life, it might enter into the evidence against the multiverse in that it points to our universe being more finely-tuned than is strictly necessary.

Closing Thoughts

It’s important to note how the values of these constants must lie within narrow ranges to be life-permitting based on multiple, independent criteria! My next blog will provide additional examples of this “coincidence.” This multiplicity makes my fine-tuning claim more robust because even if most of these peer-reviewed articles were wrong about fine-tuning claims, there would still be enough cases left to show that life-permitting physics is rare among possibilities.

Also, the question arises as to the likelihood there would exist any value for a constant that could satisfy multiple finely-tuned life-permitting criteria? Why would the life-permitting regions necessarily overlap at a single value that could then permit life relative to all of the constraints? UT Austin philosopher Robert C. Koons argues that this points to a higher-order fine-tuning and thus to design:

“When the value of a single constant is constrained in more than one way, it would be very likely that these independent constraints put contradictory demands on the value of the constraint. By way of analogy, if I consider several algebraic equations, each with a single unknown, it would be very surprising if a single value satisfied all of the equations. Thus, it is surprising that a single range of values satisfies the various anthropic constraints simultaneously. Leslie argues that this higher-order coincidence suggests that the basic form of the laws of nature has itself been designed to make anthropic fine-tuning possible. In other words, Leslie argues that there is evidence of a higher-order fine-tuning.[16]”

This coincidence grows even more surprising when one goes beyond the sheer multiplicity of constraints and also analyzes how differing powers on the constants appear in equations expressing independent and unrelated life-permitting constraints. Why is it that a given strength of electromagnetism turns out to be just right for long-lived stars, atomic stability, proton stability, electron stability, the synthesis of carbon and oxygen, the energy of photons output by stars, and the magnitude of density fluctuations in the early universe? Even speculative multiverse theories do not explain this type of coincidence.


[1] John Barrow and Frank Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 318

[2] Actually, these are constants at current densities but in the early universe the 3 non-gravitational forces are thought to have been unified in the sense that at those energy levels all of the forces behaved in the same manner. Once we get beyond the first 1/100th of a nanosecond of the universe though we can speak of these as being constants.

[3] For an explanation of this widely accepted principle, refer to my previous blog: http://crossexamined.org/god-or-multiverse.

[4] Walter Bradley. (He happened to be the head of an engineering department when I was at Texas A&M). http://www.leaderu.com/offices/bradley/docs/universe.html

[5] Luke Barnes. The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, p. 42. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647)

[6] Freeman Dyson, Scientific American 225 (1971), p. 56.

[7] John Leslie. The Prerequisites of Life in Our Universe. http://www.leaderu.com/truth/3truth12.html

[8] Martin Rees, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London A 310 (1983), p. 317.

[9] Leonard Susskind, Cosmic Landscape, p. 9.

[10] I know that this is physically unrealistic but this hypothetical analogy aids in visualizing the magnitude of the fine-tuning.

[11] NASA web site. http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a11354.html

[12] Barnes, p. 30.

[13] Ekström S., et al., Astronomy and Astrophysics, p. 514.

[14] Fred Hoyle. Engineering and Science, 11/81, p8-12.

[15] Max Tegmark and Martin Rees The Astrophysical Journal (1998), p. 499, 526

[16] Robert C. Koons. Theism vs. the Many-Worlds Hypothesis. http://www.reasons.org/articles/theism-vs.-the-many-worlds-hypothesis

In my previous blog, I discussed how the initial conditions of our universe had to be extremely finely-tuned to support life of any kind anywhere in the universe. As part of my ongoing series on how fine-tuning provides evidence for the existence of God, I now turn to the laws of physics themselves. It turns out that life seems to require all 4 fundamental forces of physics. Let’s do a quick survey of some of the many ways that alternate physics could have been life-prohibiting:

1)      Gravity is essential in the formation of stars and planets. As I discussed in a previous blog, life needs something like stars as a long-lived stable energy source. Also, as cosmologist Luke Barnes has pointed out: “if gravity were repulsive rather than attractive, then matter wouldn’t clump into complex structures. Remember: your density, thank gravity, is 1030 times greater than the average density of the universe.”

2)      The strong nuclear force is necessary to hold together the protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Without this fundamental force, no atoms would exist beyond hydrogen and thus there would be no meaningful chemistry and thus no possibility for intelligent life. The positively charged protons in the nucleus repel each other but thankfully the strong nuclear force is sufficiently stronger than electromagnetic repulsion. If the strong force acted at long ranges like gravity or electromagnetism, then no atoms would exist because it would dominate over the other forces. Barnes notes that “any structures that formed would be uniform, spherical, undifferentiated lumps, of arbitrary size and incapable of complexity.[1]”

3)      The electromagnetic force accounts for chemical bonding and for why electrons orbit the nucleus of atoms. Without chemistry, there is no plausible way to store and replicate information such as would be necessary for life. Light supplied by stars is also of critical importance to life in overcoming the tendency towards disorder, as dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Barnes points out that without electromagnetism, “all matter would be like dark matter, which can only form large, diffuse, roughly spherical haloes.[2]” Suppose like charges attracted and opposites repelled (in contrast with the behavior in our universe), there would be no atoms.

4)      The weak nuclear force plays a key role during core-collapse supernova[3] in the expulsion of key heavier elements, making them available for life rather than just entombed forever in dying stars. Also, the weak force enables the key proton-proton reaction which powers stars in our universe. There is a clever paper by Harnik[4] that attempts to find a life-permitting universe without the weak force but only at the expense of a “judicious parameter adjustment.” See this discussion of the additional finely-tuned constants that were necessary to compensate for the lack of a weak force.[5] Also, some physicists think that the weak force is necessary for there to be matter in our universe.[6]

A region of star formation in a small nearby dwarf galaxy (N90) as captured by the Hubble telescope:
StarFormation

The existence of matter in our universe relies on some asymmetries in physics that are not yet precisely understood. Most physical reactions produce matter and antimatter in equal proportions and these products would simply annihilate each other upon contact, resulting in a matter-less (and therefore lifeless) universe consisting solely of radiation. We’re fortunate that the laws are such that this asymmetry produces a slight excess of matter over antimatter (about 1 part in ten billion)[7]! It would be premature to try to make a numerical claim that a constant has to be finely-tuned to permit this phenomenon but this unusual asymmetry provides yet another example of how different physics could have been catastrophic for life.

Another key physics principle that is critical for life is quantization. Values are defined as being ‘quantized’ if they can only take on discrete rather than continuous possibilities. Without quantized orbits electrons would be sucked into the nucleus and no chemistry would be possible. This quantization also leads to stable orbitals and consistent chemical properties. If electrons could orbit the nucleus anywhere such as is permissible for planets orbiting a star, then a given chemical element would have properties which are too variable for information storage of the type needed for intelligent life. Consider how the DNA in your genome would become cancerous within a day if its properties/information content were constantly varying. Also, consider how a breath of oxygen could conceivably become poisonous if its properties had no consistency.

Some other aspects of quantum mechanics are also very important to life. We need the Pauli Exclusion Principle so that all electrons don’t just reside in the lowest energy-level orbital. The multiple levels of orbitals contribute greatly to the richness and diversity of chemistry. Not all types of particles follow the Pauli Exclusion Principle – if electrons were bosons rather than fermions they wouldn’t be restricted by this principle. The Pauli Exclusion Principle coupled with the quantization of electron orbitals is responsible for giving matter its rigidity, which is important for the existence of stable structures. Moreover, without quantum mechanics, atoms would decay in about 10-13 seconds as Earnshaw’s theorem demonstrates based on classical mechanics.

Physicist Leonard Susskind points out yet another way that physics could have been life-prohibiting:

‘The photon is very exceptional. It is the only elementary particle, other than the graviton, that has no mass… Were the photon mass even a tiny fraction of the electron mass, instead of being a long-range force, electric interactions would become short-range “flypaper forces,” totally incapable of holding on to the distant valence electrons. Atoms, molecules and life are entirely dependent on the curious fact that the photon has no mass.[8]’

The trend in physics is that the number of cases of fine-tuning is growing over time. For example, physicist Joel Primack recently discovered an important link between the existence of dark matter and galaxy formation. Primack showed that “galaxies form only at high peaks of the dark matter density.“ Galaxies are generally thought to be necessary for life because they are critical for star formation. Thus, even aspects of physics which might seem pointless, such as dark matter, turn out to play an important role in making the universe more bio-friendly. I’ve also referenced an article in a previous blog that discusses how black holes “may actually account for Earth’s existence and habitability.[9]”

Any one of these facts by itself might just be seen as fortunate coincidences but there are enough of them to provide at least modest support for my fine-tuning claim:

“In the set of possible physical laws, parameters and initial conditions, the subset that permits rational conscious life is very small.”

The support is not as strong as what I documented based on our universe’s initial conditions nor as strong as what I will document concerning the fine-tuning of the constants of nature but it adds to the overall case. Moreover, this evidence has some bearing in the consideration of the multiverse[10] as an explanation of fine-tuning because it deals with physics at the level that most multiverse proposals cannot explain. In most multiverse scenarios the laws of physics are the same – what changes are the constants in the equations representing those laws. If you want to explore more about various multiverse alternatives, here is one useful perspective that was referenced in comments of a previous blog. Max Tegmark has proposed what he calls a level 4 multiverse in which all mathematical possibilities are realized somewhere in the multiverse. If we lived in such a multiverse, Occam’s Razor would not be a fruitful heuristic and we wouldn’t have Nobel laureates[11] talking about how simple, elegant theories led them to discoveries. There would be infinitely more equations with lots of complicated terms and expressions than there would be simple equations with minimal terms. Colombia professor Peter Woit provides a powerful critique of Tegmark’s highly speculative metaphysical proposal. These multiverse scenarios in which fundamental laws are different are not widely accepted among physicists.

In summary, life needs all of the 4 fundamental forces of nature and several principles from quantum mechanics. These facts about the laws support my fine-tuning claim that life-permitting physics is rare among possibilities. Standford physicist Leonard Susskind summarizes the physics well:

“It is gradually becoming accepted, by many theoretical physicists, that the Laws of Physics may not only be variable but are almost always deadly. In a sense the laws of nature are like East Coast weather: tremendously variable, almost always awful, but on rare occasions, perfectly lovely.[12]”

 


[1] Barnes, Luke. The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, p. 18. http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647

[2] Ibid., p, 18.

[3] A supernova is an exploding star and is the key way heavy elements are distributed throughout the universe.

[4]Harnik R., Kribs G., Perez G., 2006, Physical Review D, 74, 035006

[5]Barnes, p. 46-7.

[6] Fermilab website. DOE. http://lbne.fnal.gov/why-neutrinos.shtml

[7] Here is a website if you want to explore this further: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec22.html

[8] Susskind, Leonard. The Cosmic Landscape, p. 174-5.

[9] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-black-holes-shape-galaxies-stars-planets-around-them/

[10] If you missed my other blogs and are wondering what a ‘multiverse’ is, a multiverse is simply a collection of universes. If there is a vast ensemble of other universes with widely varying laws this might be a candidate explanation of the fine-tuning. Here was my blog on that topic: http://crossexamined.org/god-or-multiverse/

[11] For example, Eugene Wigner’s famous essay on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html. Also, see how Weinberg regards beauty as a guide to finding the correct physical theories: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-weinberg.html. Or refer to this essay for a historical review: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-h-bailey/why-mathematics-matters_b_4794617.html

[12] Susskind, p. 90.