Dr. Stephen Meyer
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And then he unpacks his little thought experiments.
And so then you make some calculations, because you're a physicist, of course, right?
So you pull out your slide rule or your calculator and you start making some calculations, and then you realize, if I turn that dial one click this way or one click that way, something catastrophic would happen and life would not be possible.
So take that cosmological constant, the outward pushing force that we were talking about, that Einstein talked about.
It turns out that it's fine-tuned.
An accepted value among physicists is one part in 10 to the 90th power.
There's only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the entire universe.
So to get that right by chance would be like putting a blindfolded man out in space, trying to locate not just one elementary particle in our universe, but looking for one marked elementary particle somewhere in 10 billion universes our size.
Yeah.
That's the degree of fine-tuning.
There's another fine-tuning parameter that's even more exquisitely fine-tuned than that, and it's called the initial entropy.
And that has to do with the configuration of matter and energy at the very beginning of the universe.
So it's as if it's all finely tuned just from the beginning to make it possible for there to be stable galaxies.
Right.
So this is kind of โ one of the first scientists that discovered this was another Cambridge physicist named Sir Fred Hoyle.
And he was investigating โ trying to explain the abundance of carbon in the universe because he knew carbon was critical for forming life.
It forms long chain-like molecules that you need to store information, which is necessary to life.
And he finally came up with a process by which it might happen.
He got it tested out at Caltech.
He made a very specific prediction related to the process that he had in mind.