Dr. Stephen Meyer

The idea of fine-tuning is that there are all these...

Fundamental parameters of physics, like, for example, the cosmological constant or the strength of gravity, just those two forces are exquisitely finely tuned.

The mass of the universe, sorry, the mass of the elementary particles, the quarks, for example,

All these different physical parameters are fine-tuned in the sense that they fall within very narrow tolerances outside of which life and even basic chemistry would not be possible.

Stable galaxies would not be possible.

And the degree of fine-tuning is so exquisite that physicists now sometimes talk about our living in a fortunate universe or a Goldilocks universe.

That's the kind of idea.

I had a – there was a professor at Cambridge when I was there who came and gave a talk to one of our groups.

And his name was Sir John Polkinghorne, famous British physicist.

And he used to depict the fine-tuning by asking you to imagine that you had –

flown out into space on a spaceship.

You docked it on a spaceship.

You go in and there's this big room and it says, universe creating machine.

So you go inside and sure enough, there's this console.

And on the console, there's a dial for the strength of gravitational attraction.

There's a dial for the strength of the electromagnetic attraction.

There's a strength for the other fundamental forces of physics, a slider that sets the speed of light.

There's a little dial that sets the mass of the elementary particles.

You have all these parameters that make the universe possible.

and they're all set to very precise values.