"The Anthropic Principle refuses to go away. The mass of the light quark adds to finely tuned factors that make the universe life-supporting.
From Germany comes another fine-tuned parameter of physics. “German scholar Ulf-G Meißner, chair in theoretical nuclear physics at the Helmholtz Institute, University of Bonn, adds to a series of discoveries that support this Anthropic Principle,” an article on EurekAlert begins with the headline, “New evidence for anthropic theory that fundamental physics constants underlie life-enabling universe.” This one is particularly quarky:
And earlier, during the Big Bang’s generation of the nuclei of first two elements in the Periodic Table, he notes, “From the observed element abundances and the fact that the free neutron decays in about 882 seconds and the surviving neutrons are mostly captured in 4He, one finds a stringent bound on the light quark mass variations … under the reasonable assumption that the masses of all quarks and leptons appearing in neutron β-decay scale with the Higgs vacuum expectation value.”
It’s not clear from the quote above where the catastrophic limit is, or if “unlikely” was misprint for “likely,” given the context, because the very next statement speaks of a “stringent bound on the light quark mass variations.” There might be more clarification in Meißner’s paper in Science Bulletin.
The press release assumes a big bang and that all carbon was synthesized inside large stars, but it would seem the tight limits calculated by Meißner apply to any theory of origins. The mass of building blocks such as quarks affect the behavior of higher particles and to human beings, planets, and stars.
The press release does not limit the anthropic principle to these findings. The Anthropic Principle was enunciated decades ago. It is not a minority view:
What, exactly, is the Anthropic Principle?
There are many examples of fine-tuning. Hawking gives one:
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| Quarks are the building blocks of matter in the universe |
In one series of experiments involving intricate computer simulations on JUQUUEN at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Professor Meißner and his colleagues altered the values of light quark masses from those found in Nature to determine how great a variation would prevent the formation of carbon or oxygen inside massive stars. “Variations in the light quark masses of up to 2–3 percent are unlikely to be catastrophic to the formation of life-essential carbon and oxygen,” he concludes…
And earlier, during
“Thus,” Professor Meißner states, “the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis sets indeed very tight limits on the variations of the light quark mass.”
“Such extreme fine-tuning supports the anthropic view of our Universe,” he adds.
It’s not clear from the quote above where the catastrophic limit is, or if “unlikely” was misprint for “likely,” given the context, because the very next statement speaks of a “stringent bound on the light quark mass variations.” There might be more clarification in Meißner’s paper in Science Bulletin.
The press release assumes a big bang and that all carbon was synthesized inside large stars, but it would seem the tight limits calculated by Meißner apply to any theory of origins. The mass of building blocks such as quarks affect the behavior of higher particles and to human beings, planets, and stars.
The press release does not limit the anthropic principle to these findings. The Anthropic Principle was enunciated decades ago. It is not a minority view:
The theory that an Anthropic Principle guided the physics and evolution of the universe was initially proposed by Brandon Carter while he was a post-doctoral researcher in astrophysics at the University of Cambridge; this theory was later debated by Cambridge scholar Stephen Hawking and a widening web of physicists around the world.
What, exactly, is the Anthropic Principle?
Brandon Carter initially posited the theory: “The universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage.”
There are many examples of fine-tuning. Hawking gives one:
Stephen Hawking, expert on the Big Bang and cosmic inflation, extended the dialogue on the Anthropic Principle in a series of papers and books. In “A Brief History of Time,” he outlines an array of astrophysics phenomena and constants that seem to support the AP theory, and asks: “Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now, ten thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate?”
“If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million,” he explains, “the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size.”
One philosophical way out of the evidence for design is to imagine a multiverse where uncountable universes have constants that take on all possible values." CEH
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
Hebrews 11:3