Adam Brown

There's things like quantum mechanics and general relativity that are not

logically inevitable, but do seem to be attractors in some sense.

Then there are things like the standard model has 20 fields and it has a mass of the neutrino.

Why do those masses of the neutrino have the values that they have?

That seems the standard model was just fine

before we discovered that the neutrinos have mass in the 1990s.

And those just seem to be just totally kind of out of nowhere.

Who ordered that was a famous Nobel Prize winning physicist said about the muon.

In fact, longer ago than that, they just seem to be there, but without any particular reason.

And then there are these quantities that are somewhere in the middle that are not logically necessary, but do seem to be necessary for a life as we know it to exist.

Yeah, I think that's a great question.

And this line of thought starts to...

is a skeptical response to the anthropic principle.

An example that sometimes people use is a puddle that's sitting in some depression in the ground reflects on how wonderful the universe is, that this depression in the ground seemed to have maybe made the perfect shape for the puddle to exist.

And our view would have said, no, the reason the puddle has that shape is because it is self-adapted to the hole in the ground.

So maybe no matter what the laws of physics are,

there would be something that emerged there.

And certainly, if you go to, you know, there's all these weird bacteria at the bottom of the sea or in nuclear reactors or in various other places, this kind of life-will-find-a-way philosophy seems to be adapted at least there, where it's very different from the surface of the Earth where we find ourselves, and yet there are able to be certain things

Life is able to live in undersea vents and is able to adapt itself to those environments.

I think I basically buy that life is quite adaptable, but whether life is adaptable enough that a universe with a cosmological constant that ripped it apart every microsecond, that seems implausible to me.