Is the Universe Fine-tuned for life?

25:17Okay, so Daniel, we just finished talking about the fine structure constant. Yeah. And you talked about how if it changed at all, probably chemistry would change, which would mean life as we know it would change. before we get on to the next one, I'm going to slow us down even farther and say, how do we know for sure that there's not some third or fourth thing out there that we haven't measured that would like accommodate if we made some changes or like maybe we don't really understand what's important? Like how, I guess, how sure are we that there's not something we're missing here? Well, there's lots of things we could be missing.

25:48It could be, for example, that this number has to be what it is. We have a theory in which this number is a parameter that's not predicted, and we have to go out and measure it. And so in our theory, this number could have other values. If you're at the control panel of the universe, this is just a knob. And according to our theory, you could crank that number up or down, or it could even be changing. It's not guaranteed that this thing is fixed. All of our measurements suggest that it's fixed. And when we look back into the history of the universe, we see physics playing out the same way with the same fine structure constant.

26:25So it appears to be constant, but that's just a measurement. But it could be that our theory is just incomplete, that there's a better theory out there that's more clever, and it requires the fine structure constant to be this value. It predicts it. I mean, that would be Nobel Prize winning stuff. You come up with another theory for electrodynamics that predicts this thing and shows why it has to have this particular value. It can't have any other value, boom, you have left us forward a thousand years or whatever in physics, and you've shown us why this number is what it is. So in that sense, we could be missing something for sure.

27:00Okay, great. That's what I was asking. But there's lots of other numbers out there. And the second one also relates to a force. So the other quantum force that's out there is the strong nuclear force. So there's four fundamental quantum forces, electricity, magnetism, and the weak force, which all bundled together into a single electroweak. And then the fourth fundamental force is the strong nuclear force, which holds protons and neutrons together and also holds the nucleus together and all that good stuff. And this one, we have not yet unified with the other three quantum forces into a grand unified force.

27:31People are working on that, but we don't have that figured out yet. So we have a whole separate system of equations. They're inspired by the same machinery. It's all quantum field theory, but it's a different quantum field and the numbers are all different and it It uses weird color charges, whatever. So we got another number there, the strong coupling constant. And that's just a number. And it tells us how strong is the strong force. And it's a much bigger number than the fine structure constant, which is why the strong force is called the strong force, because it's so dang strong. And because you physicists aren't super clever with your naming structures.

28:03What would you have called the strong coupling constant, Kelly? The Hulk force or something. see me hold nucleus together that's right that's right already we've made improvements here i'm available whenever you guys need suggestions i'd love to zoom in on the nucleus and see tiny little hulks in there that would be better than gluons right little hulk-ons or something oh i'm gonna copyright that little hunky nose anyway this also has a big impact on the nature of life. We were talking a minute ago about the electron and how that determines a lot of the properties of the atom in chemistry. But of course, the nucleus is important too.

28:46And in the nucleus, it's the strong force that dominates. You have neutrons, which have no charge, and you have protons, which have positive charge. And those protons don't like to be near each other, but the strong force is strong enough to overcome that and keep all those positive charge protons bound together into a nucleus and to create those protons and neutrons in the first place. And that's really the building block of all of matter and everything in the universe. So if the strong force constant was different, you wouldn't get nuclei the same way. You wouldn't get the same isotopes. You might not even be able to manufacture these things in the hearts of stars.

29:22Okay, that sounds pretty fundamental. Why can't we make these things in the hearts of stars? Yeah, so the strong force determines not just how protons and neutrons come together, like how you build them, but how they like to stick together with a nuclei that they can form. And so what happens in a nucleus is you have protons and neutrons, and those things are all neutral from a color charge point of view. So you might wonder, like, how does the nucleus stick together anyway? Anyway, there's all these positive charges from protons and neutral charges from neutrons, and everything is also neutral from a strong force point of view.

29:58So how does this stick together? And the answer is residual strong charge, because what's happening is that the quarks in one proton are talking to the quarks inside another neutron. And so those charges are talking to each other. And that only happens if the strong force is strong enough. If you change the nature of the strong force, then you might not get fusion, for example. Like what happens when you try to stick two protons together inside the heart of a star to go from hydrogen, which is what the Big Bang made, to things like helium and lithium and carbon and oxygen and all the stuff that we need for life is you rely on a strong force to be able to grab those protons when they get close enough and stick them together.

30:35So you start changing with a strong force, you're going to change fundamentally the chemistry, the fusion that's happening inside the hearts of stars. And some of these steps in nucleosynthesis are pretty tricky. So to get carbon, for example, requires like a complicated combination of three helium simultaneously. And like this is very dependent on the strong force. So if you have your hand on that knob and you like accidentally tweak it a little bit, you could change fundamentally what's happening inside all the stars in the universe. All right, so I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable that you keep talking about chemistry, but we should push on.

31:10So this is the strong coupling constant. So for the fine structure constant, you gave us an equation to let us know like what values are going in there? What values go into the strong coupling constant? Yeah, great question. The strong coupling constant is just a number. And it's one that we derived sort of later on. So we just measured it directly because we didn't even know about the strong force until, you know, a few decades or almost a century ago. Whereas the fine structure constant comes from electromagnetism. And there were earlier experiments, you know, things to like measure the speed of light and things to measure h bar.

31:43And then we derived most of the theory of electromagnetism in terms of those existing constants, and then later realized, oh, we should put these together in terms of a dimensionless one. So short answer is we can't express the strong coupling constant in terms of other constants because we realized later on, oh, we should just define the dimensionless thing first. So the fine structure constant is a bit of a historical anomaly. And we sort of came to this way of thinking about things later on. Your initial explanation convinced me that this is important. But the explanation you just gave me for how we determined the value does not convince me that we have figured out the right way to measure this.

32:23Well, we don't know that we figured out the right way, but we have a theory, and that theory has a number in it. We can't predict that number. Our theory of the strong force would work with different values of this knob. You can make it more powerful. You can make it less powerful. Our theory essentially describes a huge range of possible strong forces. And then we have to go out in the universe and figure out which one do we have. Oh, we have the one where the knob is set to this value. And then, of course, the question, why? What does it mean? And that's the philosophical joy of physics, right?

32:54You discover the universe is set up in a certain way, and then you wonder, why this way and not some other way? Does it have to be this way? What does it mean that it is this way? But what we know is that this is a number we have no explanation for. It's independent, as far as we know, of the other constant, fine structure constant. You could change the strong coupling constant separately from the fine structure constant, and you would definitely notice. And any change, you would observe. So we can't explain it, and it seems very sensitive to the value that it's set to. So yeah, I think it's a pretty good example of something that's fine-tuned.

33:27Oh, biology is so complicated. You guys are always like, it depends. But all right. Anyway, so if I had to guess some other values that should show up in the constant, I would guess that it would have something to do with like the mass of the mass particles and the force particles. But those would have dimensions because they'd be mass. And so I'm wrong. You're mostly right. I mean, you're on the right track. Oh, good. Definitely the masses of the particles influence the way things happen. You know, if the electron were heavier, if the electron were lighter, you would get different chemistry. if the heavy versions of the up quark were lighter, then they might exist more often and play a role in life, for example.

34:08So you definitely need to capture that somehow. But you're right, you also want to avoid dimension-full numbers, things that are related in terms of mass. So we have 12 particle masses for the matter particles. There are 12 fermions. There's six quarks, up-down, charm strange bottom top and six leptons electron muon tau and then the three neutrinos so that's 12 numbers and we can make them dimensionless just by expressing them relative to g which is the gravitational constant and so we can sort of cook up a dimensionless number which reflects these masses think about it like what we're doing here is expressing the mass ratios more like so why is it correct to be looking at the mass relative to gravity as opposed to relative to the average mass of an elephant?

34:54Why is gravity the right thing to use to make your mass dimensionless? Yeah, because the nature of the universe depends on this ratio. So if you cranked down the gravitational constant and made everything weaker, and then you cranked up the masses to compensate, everything would behave the same gravitationally. And the opposite is true too. If you made gravity stronger and then you just weakened all the masses, you wouldn't notice. And so it's really this ratio that determines the behavior of these things, whether they decay into each other, all the masses, all this kind of stuff. And so, boom, that's 12 numbers right there.

35:31And that's kind of a mess. These other things, like, okay, they're fundamental forces, they determine chemistry. You could begrudge a couple of them. It feels like icky to me that we have 12 numbers here. I mean, it's divisible by two. That feels like a thing that physicists like. It would be ickier to me if there was like something that had three instead of something divisible by two. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I think it feels icky for a couple of reasons. One is I want this number to be small. I mean, the number of numbers. I wish that humanity had a theory with like one, two, three numbers.

36:04It would feel like we were on the verge of figuring it all out. So boom, adding 12 in one fell swoop, that's like an admission that we're nowhere close to the answer. And I think it also reflects the fact that we haven't solved another mystery, which is where this 12 comes from, which is why are there 12 particles, right? It feels like this is just wrapping up one piece of ignorance into another. That's what I was thinking. There should be an explanation for like, why do we have three copies of every particle? What's the relationship between the quarks and leptons anyway? Those are deeper mysteries.

36:36And I feel like if those were solved, then we could reduce the number of numbers. But we aren't there yet. So we've got to pay the price and add 12 numbers to our list. And in terms of sensitivity, obviously the masses of the up, down, and electron are very important because those are the things, the building blocks of life as we know it, and atomic matter, and me and you and bananas and kittens and all that stuff. The other particles like the top core, it's super heavy. And so it rarely appears in the universe outside of high energy collisions at the LHC or alien facilities or cosmic rays. So probably life is less sensitive to that.

37:14Like if you cranked up the top quark mass or cranked it down, probably you would still get life pretty much as we know it. Particle physicists might discover it earlier or later. So the Nobel prize trajectory would be different, like the specific scientific history, but you could make a pretty good argument that we're not that sensitive to the mass of the top quark, for example. Well, and I think giving out of Nobel prizes is not like a fundamental feature of the universe. I don't know that we need to account for that necessarily. But the other side of this, the strength of gravity is really important.

37:46You know, if gravity were a lot weaker, then we wouldn't get it clumping things together. You know, the whole history of the universe is that we start with very dense plasma, which has some slight over densities and slight under densities due to quantum fluctuations. And it's dense enough and gravity is strong enough, despite its overwhelming weakness, to start gathering this stuff together to form structure. So structure in the universe only comes because of gravity, and because gravity is powerful enough to pull this stuff together. If gravity were a little weaker, then you wouldn't get galaxies, you wouldn't get stars and planets.

38:23As it is, the gravity of atomic matter, of the protons and neutrons and electrons, wasn't enough to form galaxies and stars and planets. We needed help from the dark matter. Like if you had a universe without dark matter, just with the normal matter, atoms and whatever, you wouldn't get galaxies and stars and planets 14 billion years into the universe. It would take a lot, lot longer if it ever happened at all. So it takes not just gravity, but the right amount of gravity and the right density of dark matter to construct this structure that we live on. You know, the whole framework of the universe depends on gravity having its strength.

39:01All right. So now you've convinced me that it's important to have gravity in here instead of the average mass of a big elephant. But it also goes the other direction. Like if gravity was too strong, then we wouldn't have the universe that we know and love. We would have a lot more black holes. It would like pull stuff together more rapidly. We'd have smaller stars because you get more seeding of individual bits. Remember the way stars form is you have a huge cloud of gas and there are little seeds there, little places where gravity is slightly more powerful. But if gravity was everywhere more powerful, you'd get more seeds.

39:35And you end up with smaller stars and smaller stars are colder. Like our sun is unusually big and hot for the universe. So in a universe with stronger gravity, you get more black holes and a bunch of small, cold stars. And that would be a very different kind of universe to grow up in. And so is the fact that our sun is unusually big and hot, does that kind of explain why life is so rare in the universe that you kind of need a big, hot sun? It's a hypothesis I've heard, you know, because most of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarves. So why didn't we evolve around a red dwarf? Does that mean that the sun is the only kind of place that life can evolve?

40:12Or does it just mean we got lucky and got a bigger, hotter sun? And it's just, you know, in most universes, we would have evolved around red dwarves. Red dwarves seem a little bit more chaotic. They're maybe not as stable as our star is. But this is the problem with n equals one philosophizing, right? We have one example and we're trying to draw conclusions from it. You know how dangerous that is. Like you have two kids. They're very different. I have two kids. They're very different. Imagine you only had one kid and you're like, well, every kid that I have is like this kid. Obviously, that's not true, you know?

40:41And so it's very dangerous to generalize from one example, to assume that this example tells you something inherent about the process you're studying. So it's pretty dangerous, yeah. Let's take a break and then we'll talk about the last few constants that determine whether or not you get to stay alive.

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42:23But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Aging doesn't stop. And neither should you. With Vital Proteins Collagen and Protein Shakes. Because around the age of 30, your body needs more support for movement and recovery. On workout and rest days, reach for a 30-gram total protein shake or go with our classic collagen peptides.

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44:24All right, Daniel, we're talking about constants that are necessary for life as we know it. Which constants have we not talked about yet? So there's a few more messy particle physics constants that indicate that particle physicists really haven't figured it out yet. There's three more particle masses we have to account for. This is the Higgs boson mass, the W mass, and the Z mass. And the W and the Z mass are the reason that the weak force is weaker than electromagnetism. So the fine structure constant sets the strength of electroweak force. But part of that electroweak force is the weak force.

44:56And that's weaker because the W and Z masses have the values that they have. We don't know why they are. According to our theory, there could have been different values there. They tend to be very large, which makes the weak force very weak. In other universes, maybe the weak force is stronger. And they didn't call it the weak force. You know, they call it the mini Hulk force or something like that. That's the universe I want to live in. Yeah. The Higgs boson is a special mystery why it has the value that it does. We suspect the Higgs boson mass should be much, much bigger. Our calculations for the Higgs boson mass involve calculating a 10-digit number and then subtracting from it another 10-digit independent number and getting this three-digit mass.

45:35The Higgs boson mass is 125 GeV. But like, what are the odds of having these two 10-digit numbers exactly balanced or almost exactly balanced? So the Higgs mass itself, people think, is fine-tuned and it controls the masses of everything else. And so this whole thing feels like very arbitrary and not well understood. So that's three more masses. And so here, too, we've got masses. And so what are they relative to? Yeah, good point. They're relative, again, to the gravitational constant, to big G, so we can keep them dimensionless. Okay, and the fact that there's three feels wrong, but we'll move on.

46:11I guess you're not Catholic. You don't find the universe to be three-ish fundamentally, huh? I was raised Catholic, but I don't go to mass anymore. My apologies. Well, that's probably just because of the fine-tuning of the constants. It's not your fault. Oh, yeah. Okay. So then we have eight more parameters that me and particle physicists haven't figured it out yet. And these are how the fermions talk to each other. We have these complicated mixing parameters that tell us like how different neutrinos turn from one into another or how quarks can turn from one flavor into another flavor. And so there's eight numbers there that we just measure in the universe.

46:47We can't predict. We don't know why they have their values. I hope alien physicists have figured it out. But again, these things determine the nature of the universe and determine how often particles change from one kind to the other. Probably life is not super sensitive to these because it mostly involves the heavier, rarer particles that we don't see mostly in terms of life. But, you know, we don't understand these things super well. These things could also determine things like the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. I think a lot of this is why we have matter and not antimatter in the universe.

47:21So in a universe where these numbers are different, you might have a perfect balance between matter and antimatter. And then in the beginning of the universe, you get no electrons. You get no protons. You just get light as all the matter and antimatter annihilates into photons. And that's it. And so it could be that these numbers determine the matter-antimatter asymmetry, which is why we're made of matter. Or, you know, other sets of these values, you could end up with the universe made of antimatter that they, of course, would call matter. And so it's not well understood, but it could certainly influence the nature of the universe.

47:53I'll note that as you're talking about these conditions under which we might all be annihilated, you have this weird like sparkle in your eye. But anyway, just to try to bottom line where we are so far, there is at least 26 dimensionless values in the equations that govern how the universe works. and they vary in the extent to which we think that they are critical for the universe to work as we know it. So some of these you can tinker with a little bit, maybe you'd still get life. And some of these, if you tinkered with them, even a teeny tiny bit, it's hard to imagine that you could ever get life.

48:31Yes, exactly. And the last one is the cosmological constant. This is a big one. This is the one that determines how fast the universe is accelerating. It's our best explanation for dark matter. We think that space has some inherent potential energy, and according to General Relativity, if space has potential energy in it, then you get this repulsive, accelerating expansion in the universe. And so this is very important for the formation of the universe as we know it. If the expansion rate is too large, then the universe starts to tear itself apart before gravity can do its work and form stars and planets.

49:08If this number is too small, the universe collapses due to gravity very early on into one mega black hole. And so you can't tweak the cosmological constant very much, which is the source of all the recent consternation. You know, people have been trying to measure this number and finding that, oh, actually it doesn't make sense to have it be a single number and it needs to change over time because the structure of the universe is very sensitive to this number. And the more we measure about the evolution of the structure, the more we have questions about whether this number actually is a constant or whatever.

49:38But the point is, this is a big one. It controls the structure of the universe as we know it. And so, yeah, a lot of these, the universe is very sensitive to. Some of them you might be able to fudge a little bit. But we're still faced with these questions like, does this mean the universe is fine-tuned? We have all these numbers that we don't have predictions for. If we change them a little bit, life would be different. What does that really mean? And that's where we get into the philosophy. Yeah, I feel like quite clearly, this is where physicists should start talking about the existence of God and stuff, but I don't see that in the outline.

50:11And so what are the philosophical explanations that physicists tackle? So my favorite explanation is, look, we're just not done. There is a theory out there that does explain these things that tells us why it has to be this way, that connects these masses. And maybe that theory has zero, maybe it has one parameter. But if we had a deeper insight or we could crib on alien physics textbooks, you know, or even future humanity, that maybe we just have a deeper understanding and the universe has to be this way. We just don't get it yet. That's my favorite explanation because it also inspires more research.

50:47You know, it tells us to keep digging, that there are more answers there. And if we keep going, we'll figure it out. So that's why I like that explanation. Not because I know that it's true or I can argue for it like scientifically, but it's the one that inspires us to keep going because that's the whole motivation of science, right? Let's keep trying to understand. Let's keep looking for those explanations. We have no reason to believe those explanations exist or that the universe is sensible at some fundamental level anyway. They're sort of operating just on the assumption that it is. And so it's worked well so far.

51:18Let's keep going. Well, and I like that explanation because it's actionable. It's like, okay, we don't know, but let's not give up. Let's keep trying. And so, all right, so we've got, that's explanation one. What's explanation two? Explanation two is that there is no explanation. These are just random, right? And they could have any value. And we happen to live in a universe where these values are the ones that we need for life. And so life evolves according to the laws of physics to fit into it. It sort of shapes life. You know, some other weird form of life couldn't have evolved in this universe because our form of life is very sensitive to the chemistry and the structure of the universe and all this kind of stuff.

51:56And, you know, there's an explanation here that's called the anthropic principle that says that we wouldn't be here if those fine-tuned constants weren't fine-tuned to the numbers needed for life to be as we know it. So in most of those universes where you change those numbers, you don't get Daniel and Kelly having a podcast conversation about it. You don't get people writing philosophy papers about it. It's not a question because we're not there to ask it. And so this sort of says, well, look, this is a big coincidence, but there's no deeper explanation. But so doesn't that kind of depend heavily on what we know, like how we understand how things worked out?

52:34Like if you tinkered with these values, maybe you wouldn't end up with galaxies. You would end up with like one big flat disk that we all live on or something. And maybe we'd all have tentacles. And how much are we biased by? Is tentacles a bad outcome or a good outcome? I'm trying to figure that out. Oh, I don't know. I could see it going either way. It's hard to watch cat videos when you only have tentacles. Can you use your suckers to control the phone? I don't know how that works. I mean, you could get attachments for your suckers maybe, and that could help you with your phone. But we're getting off topic here.

53:08But so how do we know that the universe couldn't just look so different that it's like beyond our ability to comprehend? Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's another explanation, right? So wrapping up the anthropic explanation, I agree with you. And the thing I don't like about it is that it tells us to stop looking. It says, look, there are no answers, so don't waste your time. And it can hide real explanations. Like there are sometimes real explanations. And if you just say, look, I don't know, and it's just the way it is, and we wouldn't be here to ask these questions otherwise, then it stops you from finding true answers.

53:43So I'm not a big fan of the anthropic explanation. And another answer to this question is that we don't know what life would be like in these other scenarios. It's true that if you tweak the fine structure constant, you get very different chemistry, and therefore you would have to have different life. But we don't know what that life would be like. And if that life would also ask this question, and it presumes, the structure of this question presumes that, like, we are some sort of outlier. We're unusual in our complexity and intelligence. It might be that we're kind of simple and boring. And then if you change one of these fine structure constants or one of the other constants, you get a much more interesting universe filled with life.

54:19And they're all super intelligent. They figure it out fast and light travel. And we're a bad outcome. We're like, oh, boy. I hope we don't get that universe. And so call comes down to the question you asked earlier, basically. Do aliens have tentacles? We can't imagine life as we don't know it. It's very hard for us to think outside the box. We don't know where the box edges are, what assumptions we're making that we don't even realize. And it's almost impossible to calculate. You might say, well, Daniel, you're a physicist. Change the numbers. Run the simulations. Tell us what those universes are like, right?

54:54That involves so much complexity. We can't even tell you how stars form. We don't understand the nature of the universe. We have to just go out and look, right? We can't start from these principles and tell you how our universe should look because we can't do the calculations. is too complicated. We can't predict what chicken soup tastes like from particle physics, right? That's right. Too many numbers. We can't predict the weather. We don't understand turbulence. And so I can't then change these numbers and tell you what the universe would look like. It's too complicated. We're not capable of doing that.

55:27So we don't know, right? And you're right that it could be that in most settings of these numbers, we get interesting stuff, life and intelligence and happiness and parasites and tentacles, good or bad. So yeah, we don't know. And I think that's what you were asking. And so then let's just wrap up. The last possible answer is like, well, maybe they are fine-tuned, you know, maybe we're living in a simulation or God exists and they have set these numbers to be the way they are. And discovering these things means that we're special. And I don't like that answer because it makes us sound special.

55:57And anything that makes us sound special is too tempting and too seductive and makes me very skeptical. I'm with you there. All right. So thanks everyone for coming along on this ride between physics and philosophy, exploring the nature of the universe, what it all means, what we've learned, and what we have yet to figure out. See you all next time.

56:20Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. The washer won't start and the laundry's already piled to the ceiling.

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