Four reasons you shouldn't exist

Some scientists have had the belief that they had been urged to stop their inquiry into the origins of the cosmos. In this post I showed how that was a mistaken view of what were actually statements urging them to not be limited in their fields of scrutiny as they endeavour to understand our place in the universe. They urged greater engagement, not less.

To continue the theme, I wondered in my previous post just below whether, just as physicists sometimes fail to give credit to those who had developed mathematical foundations for the “hidden reality”  of the cosmos so too they sometimes do not give enough weight to the insights many others have with regards the Holy, especially given the widespread experiences of the Thou. That post ended with questions raised by physicists relating to the limits of scientific knowledge as it stands.

Dave Goldberg

Further questions of that kind are posed in this post, which aims to also convey the sense of wonder and fun even of the article Four Reasons You Shouldn’t Exist by Dave Goldberg, a professor of physics at Drexel University, Philadelphia, and author, most recently, of The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality. His basic point:

        “It would be a mistake to be comforted by the symmetries of the universe. In truth, they are your worst enemies. Everything we know about those rational, predictable arrangements dictates that you shouldn't be here at all. How hostile is the universe to your fundamental existence? Very. Even the simplest assumptions about our place in the universe seem to lead inexorably to devastating results.”

He displays an impressive black humour throughout this article with such statements as:

         “We're lucky life began on Earth at all, of course, and that something as complex as humans evolved. It was improbable that your parents met each other and conceived you at just the right instant, and their parents and their parents and so on back to time immemorial. This is science’s way of reminding you to be grateful for what you have.
        “But even so, I have news for you: It's worse than you think. Much worse.
        “Your existence wasn’t just predicated on amorousness and luck of your ancestors, but on an almost absurdly finely tuned universe. Had the universe opted to turn up the strength of the electromagnetic force by even a small factor, poof! Suddenly stars wouldn’t be able to produce any heavy elements, much less the giant wet rock we’re standing on. Worse, if the universe were only minutely denser than the one we inhabit, it would have collapsed before it began.”

I encourage you to read the full article as it (relatively) simply delves into some of the key matters he and his colleagues around the world are exploring. Further, the piece is another example of how humility remains a central quality of an inquiring mind. It also an example of the basic question that Lisa Randall, professor of physics at Harvard,  posed to conclude my previous post: “Even if we knew the ultimate underlying theory, how are we going to explain the fact that we’re here?”