https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/electron-mass-vital-life-in-universe/?utm_sourc...

"All told, it takes at least 26 separate fundamental constants to describe the Universe that we presently understand, and we have no idea why these constants have the values that they do. If some of these constants were either too small or too large, our Universe as we know it would be impossible; our very existence is evidence that the laws of nature must be consistent with our existence being possible. If gravity were a little bit stronger or weaker, stars, galaxies, planets, and life would still exist. Same with:

"the strengths of the other forces,
the masses of the quarks,
or the value of the speed of light.

***

"...if you tried to tinker with the mass of the electron in this fashion, the possibility of life arising swiftly vanishes.

"If you were to raise the mass of the electron by too great of an amount, atomic and molecular transitions would become impossible under conventional conditions, even in direct sunlight.

"Similarly, if you were to lower the mass of the electron significantly, even weak, low-energy interactions would prevent us from having stable atoms or molecules of any type for very long.

"It’s only with the value of the mass of the electron our Universe actually has, or at least with that mass falling in a very narrow range, that life, organic molecules, or even complex chemistry of any type remains possible.

***

"In other words, if the electron has a significantly higher rest mass than it does, the chemistry-based reactions that power all biological processes on Earth would be extraordinarily rare, as the energetic events that occur in the Universe — the shining of stars, geothermal heat, volcanic eruptions, etc. — would only rarely even be able to cause an atomic or molecular transition. Without those, no sorts of complex chemistry, chain reactions, or biological processes would be able to reliably occur, much less occur readily and ubiquitously. A Universe where the electron was heavier than it is, even by a factor of 10 or so (and perhaps even less), would be incapable of supporting life as we know and understand it.

"The opposite problem would arise if the electron were too light. Just as a heavier electron would mean a smaller, more tightly bound, and more challenging-to-excite (or ionize) atom, a lighter electron would translate into the opposite set of conditions: a larger, more loosely bound, more easily excited (or ionized) atom. As in the case of a heavier electron, this wouldn’t apply only to hydrogen, but to any and all atoms.

"Now consider that the average energy of a visible light photon — the kind produced by the Sun and all stars undergoing nuclear fusion in their cores — is around 2 or 3 eV. If we reduced the mass of the electron even by a factor of five, to just 20% of its present mass, then instead of atomic or molecular transitions occurring frequently in direct sunlight, atomic and molecular bonds would be routinely destroyed, as those atoms and molecules would be ionized completely, simply by exposing them to light.

"Sunlight has the power to create but also to destroy. It’s only because the mass of the electron falls into that “sweet spot” where atomic and molecular transitions are routinely stimulated by, but where those bonds are not broken by, the energy of direct sunlight that so many reactions, including photosynthetic ones, are possible and routine: on our world and within our Universe.

***

"...the building block structures of the small-scale objects in our Universe, i.e., atoms, are extremely sensitive to the mass of the electron. If everything else remained the same but the mass of the electron were at all substantially different from the value it possesses today — whether significantly lighter or heavier — complex chemistry and life processes would be all but forbidden. Too light of an electron would lead to a Universe where atoms and molecules were too easily destroyed, and where even visible light would “cook” anything that attempted to form. Too heavy of an electron, and atoms and molecules couldn’t leave the ground state, unable to undergo the types of transitions that all chemical and biological reactions depend upon.

"Life is certainly possible within our Universe and with the constants that we have. But if the electron’s mass were altered only slightly — either heavier or lighter — the Universe would be a whole lot lonelier."

Comment: of course, we would not be here if things weren't exactly as they are. But here we learn of another fine-tuning point in the construction of our universe that provides for life to appear. I've not included all the background physics in the article. Support for design.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134773-000-why-physicists-are-rethinking-the-r...

"The twistor was first dreamed up in the late 1960s by the University of Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose. He saw it as a tool that might help unite quantum theory with gravity. Twistor theory essentially seeks to encode the universe’s events – a particle collision, say – as twistors, whose interactions give us the physics we observe. But twistors can be broken down, mathematically speaking, into yet more geometrical objects called spinors. These come in two varieties, referred to as left and right-handed spinors.

"Woit is using spinors and twistors to create what he hopes are the foundations of a theory of everything. He describes space and time using vectors, which are mathematical instructions for how to move between two points in space and time – that are the product of two spinors. “The conventional thing to do has been to say that space-time vectors are products of a right-handed and a left-handed spinor,” says Woit. But he claims he has now worked out how to create space-time from two copies of the right-handed spinors.

"The beauty of it, says Woit, is that this “right-handed space-time” leaves the left-handed spinors free to create particle physics. In quantum field theory, spinors are used to describe fermions, the particles of ordinary matter. So Woit’s insights into spinor geometry might lead to laws describing the holy trinity of space, time and matter.

"The idea has got Woit excited. He has spent most of his career looking at other ideas, thinking they will go somewhere, and being disappointed. “But the more I looked at twistor theory, the more it didn’t fall apart,” he says. “Not only that, I keep discovering new ways in which it actually works.”

***

"Berman agrees there is scope for improvement, but feels string theory is still the best candidate. “I just don’t see anything else with that level of complexity and achievement,” he says. But he adds that there is room for other approaches and we should encourage them: “We certainly shouldn’t throw stones at each other.”

***

"Loll’s framework gets a good bit more sophisticated. Use not one sheet of space-time, but an ensemble of many layers, and she can recreate some features of quantum theory, which is encouraging. And, even if it is early days for the idea, Loll reckons there will be ways to probe it with real experiments connected to the radiation left over after the big bang. “We are getting towards observables that could conceivably have left some imprint in the cosmic microwave background radiation.”

***

"The pair [Grimstrup and Aastrup] start with their configuration space, which is a description of space-time. But as they analysed the mathematics, they found the mathematical signatures of fermions encoded within the geometry. “What we are doing is simply considering the geometry of that space,” says Grimstrup. “By doing this, we relatively easily obtain the basic building blocks of both general relativity and quantum field theory. So the ‘stuff’ is there, but not as a part of the foundation.”

"Perhaps even more exciting is the fact that something akin to Einstein’s vision of gravity appears too. “Gravity plays no role in our construction in its initial form: gravity in this construction is emergent,” says Grimstrup. It isn’t yet clear whether this is actually general relativity. “We see promising signs, but we need to check a few things before we can say that with certainty.”

***

"It is speculation at this point. That said, when Woit – who has long been known as an arch cynic – is excited about the search for a theory of everything again, maybe all bets are off. Playing with twistors has changed him, he says. “I’ve spent most of my life saying that I don’t have a convincing idea and I don’t know anyone who does. But now I’m sending people emails saying: ‘Oh, I have this great idea’.”

"Woit says it with a grin, acknowledging the hubris of thinking that maybe, after so many millennia, we might finally have cracked the universe open. “Of course, it may be that there’s something wrong with me,” he says. “Maybe I’ve just gotten old and just lost my way.'”

Comment: next Einstein needed. All this activity tells us the very old string theory is dying. These theories are too difficult for lay people to understand. Space-time is not really difficult. That tells us the next theory should reach a simple point.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-explains-fibonacci-sequence/?utm_campaign=...

"One of the most fascinating facts about the natural world is that so many entities within it — both biologically and purely physically — obey a specific set of patterns and ratios. Many galaxies exhibit spiral shapes and structures, as do a wide variety of plant structures: pinecones, pineapples, and sunflower heads among them. Ammonites, shelled animals that went extinct more than 60 million years ago, also show that spiral pattern, where one of the key features of spirals is that the next “wind” around outside the prior one displays a specific length ratio to the size of the prior, interior winding.

"That ratio, in any such structure, is often extremely close to the ratio of two adjacent numbers found in the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical sequence, often taught to children, simply starts with the numbers “0” and “1” and then gets the next term in the sequence by adding the two prior terms together. It’s arguably the most famous mathematical sequence of all, but what explains the sequence’s pattern, and is it truly, inextricably linked to nature?

***

"The few spirals that do show that Fibonacci-like pattern are a part of a class of spirals known as Grand Design Spiral Galaxies, and these represent only about 1-in-10 spiral galaxies, as opposed to the most common types with multi-arm spirals (including the Milky Way) and the second most common type with subtle, many-laned spiral structure known as flocculent spiral galaxies. These “grand design” spirals are almost exclusively galaxies that have recently undergone or are currently undergoing a gravitational interaction with a nearby companion galaxy, and it’s only that external gravitational influence that pulls the outermost arms and features into shapes that are more consistent with ratios found within the Fibonacci sequence.

***

"However, the Fibonacci-like patterns and ratios found in many biological organisms, including in plants, truly are related to the Fibonacci sequence: both in a mathematically rigorous fashion and also for an evolutionary reason that makes perfect sense. Let’s tackle the biological properties first, and return to the mathematics.

***

"It turns out there’s nothing special about the starting point of the Fibonacci sequence, either. You can start with any two non-negative numbers that you like where at least one of them is non-zero: they need not be “0” and “1,” they need not be whole numbers, they need not be close together. All you need to do is follow the same formula, where you take the first two numbers and add them together to make the next (third) number, and then add that number with the previous to make the next subsequent number, and so on. No matter which numbers you start with, the ratio of any two successive numbers will quickly approach φ, the golden ratio. (my bold)

***

"...the original sequence, i.e., the sum of the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence sorted by decimal places, equals 0.1/8.9, or 1/89. And that’s why the Fibonacci sequence isn’t inherent to nature, but rather, to pure mathematics instead. It appears in nature because the golden ratio has a biological utility, but wherever it appears in the physical sciences, including in some spiral galaxies, it’s only by pure coincidence!"

Comment: only a small number of galactic spirals are Fibonacci. But it turns up in many organisms. The golden ratio is mentioned and is an ancient discovery:

"Golden ratio, in mathematics, the irrational number (1 + Square root of√5)/2, often denoted by the Greek letter ϕ or τ, which is approximately equal to 1.618. It is the ratio of a line segment cut into two pieces of different lengths such that the ratio of the whole segment to that of the longer segment is equal to the ratio of the longer segment to the shorter segment. The origin of this number can be traced back to Euclid, who mentions it as the “extreme and mean ratio” in the Elements."

https://www.britannica.com/science/golden-ratio

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-century-later-new-

"While it might seem obvious that smaller mass would lead to smaller curvature, things are not so cut and dry when it comes to general relativity. According to the theory, dense concentrations of matter can “warp” a portion of space, making it highly curved. In some cases, this curvature can be extreme, possibly leading to the formation of black holes. This could occur even in a space with small amounts of matter, if it’s concentrated strongly enough.

"In a recent paper, Conghan Dong, a graduate student at Stony Brook University, and Antoine Song, an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, proved that a sequence of curved spaces with smaller and smaller amounts of mass will eventually converge to a flat space with zero curvature.

"This result is a noteworthy advance in the mathematical exploration of general relativity — a pursuit that continues to pay dividends more than a century after Einstein devised his theory. Dan Lee, a mathematician at Queens College who studies the mathematics of general relativity but was not involved in this research, said that Dong and Song’s proof reflects a deep understanding of how curvature and mass interact.

***

"At the heart of the conjecture is a measurement of curvature. Space can curve in different ways, different amounts, and different directions — like a saddle (in two dimensions) that curves up going forward and back, but down going to the left and right. Dong and Song ignore those details. They use a concept called scalar curvature, which represents the curvature as a single number that summarizes the full curvature in all directions.

***

"Dong and Song’s new work, said Daniel Stern of Cornell University, is “one of the strongest results we have so far that shows us how scalar curvature controls [the] geometry” of the space as a whole. Their paper illustrates that “if we have nonnegative scalar curvature and small mass, we understand the structure of space very well.”

***

"To simplify their task, Dong and Song adopted another mathematical trick from Stern and his co-authors, which showed that a three-dimensional space can be divided into infinitely many two-dimensional slices called level sets, much as a hard-boiled egg can be segmented into narrow sheets by the taut wires of an egg slicer.

"The level sets inherit the curvature of the three-dimensional space they comprise. By focusing their attention on level sets rather than on the bigger three-dimensional space, Dong and Song were able to reduce the dimensionality of the problem from three to two. That’s very beneficial, Song said, because “we know a lot about two-dimensional objects … and we have a lot of tools to study them.”

"If they could successfully show that each level set is “kind of flat,” Song said, this would allow them to attain their overall goal of showing that a three-dimensional space with little mass is close to flat. Fortunately, this strategy panned out."

Comment: further proof the space of the Universe is flat.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh9024

The problem of understanding fundamental physical constants and their values was discussed in particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology. Here, I show that an additional unexpected insight comes from condensed matter physics and liquid physics in particular: Fundamental constants have a biofriendly window constrained by biofriendly viscosity and diffusion setting the motion in essential life processes in and across cells. I also show that bounds on viscosity, diffusion, and the fundamental velocity gradient in a biochemical machine can all be varied while keeping the fine-structure constant and the proton-to-electron mass ratio intact, with no implication for the production of heavy nuclei in stars. This leads to a conjecture of multiple tuning and an evolutionary mechanism.

***

Here, I show that these models are nevertheless possible. These models are general enough to impose constraints on fundamental constants from biofriendly viscosity and diffusion involved in essential life processes setting the motion in and across cells. These constraints imply a biofriendly window for fundamental constants. I show that bounds on viscosity and diffusion can be varied while keeping α and β intact, with no implication for the production of heavy nuclei. The same applies to the fundamental velocity gradient that I introduce in relation to flow in a biochemical machine. These observations lead to a conjecture of multiple tuning and an evolutionary mechanism.

I consider the cell, the basic building block of life forms. There are several areas related to cells where flow is important. The two important ones are the operation of the cell itself [e.g., transport involving protein motors and cytoskeletal filaments, passive and active molecular transport, cytoplasmic mixing, mobility of cytoplasmic constituents, diffusion involved in cell proliferation (14, 15), and so on] and the flow in the organism involving many cells (e.g., blood flow). Another area where flow is important is related to the prebiotic synthesis of life building blocks in the metabolic flux, the basis of life, thought to give rise to DNA blocks in protocells (16). Liquids and gases are two states providing a medium where this flow can happen and matter can move. Viscosity governs this flow and is therefore tightly embedded in life processes and their dynamics.

Comment: This tells us water is the perfect solvent for cellular biochemical activities. Sabine Hossenfelder discusses:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGtwqNLtpkrgQGvWpXfrChXgHJJ

"A scientist at the Queen Mary University of London has shown that our universe is bio-friendly in a surprising way. For life to be possible, liquids should neither flow too easily nor too slowly, and in our universe, they do it just the right way. The flowing behaviour of liquids is quantified with the “viscosity” of a liquid. Honey has high viscosity. Superfluids (technically) have a viscosity of zero.

"According to the new paper, a proper viscosity level is necessary for vital cell processes. For example, if the viscosity of water is too high, cellular processes such as protein folding and enzyme activity stop working. If it’s too low, cell membranes become useless. And while life on earth is based on water in particular, the paper's author claims these viscosity bounds need to be fulfilled by whatever liquid on which life elsewhere is based.

"Viscosity is, of course, not a fundamental quantity, but ultimately derives from other, more fundamental constants – such as the masses of elementary particles and the strengths of their interactions – so any bound on the viscosity of water implicitly provides another constraint on the fundamental constants."

More comment: just another level of fine tuning.

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-cup-secrets-universe.html

"Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have made a discovery that could change our understanding of the universe. In their study published in Science Advances, they reveal, for the first time, that there is a range in which fundamental constants can vary, allowing for the viscosity needed for life processes to occur within and between living cells. This is an important piece of the puzzle in determining where these constants come from and how they impact life as we know it.

***

"Fundamental physical constants shape the fabric of the universe we live in. Physical constants are quantities with a value that is generally believed to be both universal in nature and to remain unchanged over time—for example the mass of the electron. They govern nuclear reactions and can lead to the formation of molecular structures essential to life, but their origin is unknown. This research might bring scientists one step closer to determining where these constants come from.

"'Understanding how water flows in a cup turns out to be closely related to the grand challenge to figure out fundamental constants. Life processes in and between living cells require motion and it is viscosity that sets the properties of this motion. If fundamental constants change, viscosity would change too impacting life as we know it. For example, if water was as viscous as tar life would not exist in its current form or not exist at all. This applies beyond water, so all life forms using the liquid state to function would be affected."

"'Any change in fundamental constants including an increase or decrease would be equally bad news for flow and for liquid-based life. We expect the window to be quite narrow: for example, viscosity of our blood would become too thick or too thin for body functioning with only a few percent change of some fundamental constants such as the Planck constant or electron charge," Professor of Physics Kostya Trachenko said.

"Surprisingly, the fundamental constants were thought to be tuned billions of years ago to produce heavy nuclei in stars and back then life as we know it today didn't exist. There was no need for these constants to be fine-tuned at that point to also enable cellular life billions of years later, and yet these constants turn out to be bio-friendly to flow in and between living cells. (my bold)

"An accompanying conjecture is that multiple tunings may have been involved and this then suggests a similarity to biological evolution where traits were acquired independently. Through evolutionary mechanisms, fundamental constants may be the result of nature arriving at sustainable physical structures. It remains to be seen how the principles of evolution can be helpful to understand the origin of fundamental constants."

Comment: The last paragraph is the usual Darwinian attempt. They admit the constants are ancient and nature had to adapt. This is physics studying biology. If God gave us ife, they are His contants.l

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25834460-800-rethinking-reality-is-the-entire-un...

"These are the layers of reality, and this is how physicists understand the universe: by breaking everything down into its constituent parts, an approach known as reductionism. As a particle physicist, I grew up on this philosophy. It has brought physics a long way – it is how we built our current picture of matter and its workings, after all. But now, with further progress stalling, I am convinced we need to go about things differently from here.

"Rather than zooming ever further inwards, I think we need to zoom out. In doing so, we may see that everything there is, including such seemingly fundamental things as space and time, fragment out of a unified whole. This might sound like philosophy or mysticism, but it is in fact a direct result of applying quantum mechanics to the entire cosmos. When you do that, you realise that the universe isn’t fundamentally made of separate parts at all, but is instead a single, quantum object.

***

"In the 1930s, when Enrico Fermi worked out how a neutron decays into a proton and spits out an electron – known as beta decay – he did so only by considering the electrons, protons and neutrons involved. Only decades later, when physicists discovered an intermediary particle called the W boson, did they realise there was a deeper layer of interactions playing out at tinier scales.

"From today’s perspective, Fermi’s description is the prime example of an effective field theory (EFT), a mathematical framework that allows us to divide reality into different size scales and analyse them separately. In this way, physics behaves like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls, where you can understand the outer doll without knowing anything about the dolls inside.

***

"Both supersymmetry and the extra dimensions idea predicted the discovery of new physics at the LHC, in the form of either new supersymmetric particles or excitations in quantum fields that would run around the curled-up dimensions. So far, however, the LHC has found the Higgs boson and nothing else. The possible solutions to the fine-tuning problem have become increasingly fine-tuned themselves, because the LHC keeps ruling out hiding places.

"In short, particle physics is in crisis. This is why a small group of theorists, including me, has recently started to explore another, radical approach – one that proposes an alternative to reductionism as we know it. Instead of treating the different energy scales of the universe separately, it treats them as if they all have some bearing on each other.

***

"While studying black holes, Cohen and his colleagues calculated that there is a maximum length, or minimum energy, at which the standard model stops being valid. Beyond it, gravity takes over. It might seem intuitive that if there is a lower limit, there must also be an upper one. But crucially the researchers found that these seemingly unrelated cutoffs aren’t independent of each other. In other words, the physics at these vastly different energy scales seems to be related – a phenomenon dubbed UV/IR mixing.

***

"It is a bold idea, but I suspect entanglement causes UV/IR mixing. If so, there are huge implications for understanding reality at its most fundamental. If entanglement can be applied to the entire cosmos, then instead of everything being made of smaller and smaller pieces, it would turn the universe into “a single, indivisible unit”, in the words of quantum pioneer David Bohm. All objects in existence would be encoded in a universal wave function, a mathematical entity that describes a single, entangled state.

"Soon, we may know if this matches up with reality. Cohen and his collaborators suggested UV/IR mixing would affect the interaction of electrons or subatomic particles called muons with electromagnetic fields, showing up as a mismatch between the standard model’s predictions and measurements. And the phenomenon may crop up in other processes, too. One example my colleagues and I are currently exploring relates to neutrino masses. Unlike any other particles, the almost non-existent masses of the elusive neutrinos can be entirely generated by virtual particles, according to some models. This means they should be more sensitive than other particles to any UV/IR mixing effects.

"If we do find evidence to support this idea, it would dramatically alter the way we conceive of the cosmos. It would mean we could not only see a world in a grain of sand, as the poet William Blake once said, but we could also quite literally see the entire universe in its tiniest pieces and particles. While this might sound like just a different way of going about physics, it is much more than that. I believe that we are on the way to a completely new understanding of how the universe is put together."

Comment: this is an old idea presented by Nadeau and Kafatos in their 1999 book: "The Non-local Universe." It took this long for science to catch up.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230515132024.htm

"A research team, composed of climatologists and an astronomer, have used an improved computer model to reproduce the cycle of ice ages (glacial periods) 1.6 to 1.2 million years ago. The results show that the glacial cycle was driven primarily by astronomical forces in quite a different way than it works in the modern age. These results will help us to better understand the past, present, and future of ice sheets and the Earth's climate.

"Earth's orbit around the Sun and its spin axis orientation change slowly over time, due to the pull of gravity from the Sun, the Moon, and other planets. These astronomical forces affect the environment on Earth due to changes in the distribution of sunlight and the contrast between the seasons. In particular, ice sheets are sensitive to these external forces resulting in a cycle between glacial and interglacial periods.

"The present-day glacial-interglacial cycle has a period of about 100,000 years. However, the glacial cycle in the early Pleistocene (about 800,000 years ago) switched more rapidly, with a cycle of about 40,000 years. It has been believed that astronomical external forces are responsible for this change, but the details of the mechanism have not been understood. In recent years, it has become possible to investigate in more detail the role of astronomical forces through the refinement of geological data and the development of theoretical research.

***

"From analysis of these simulation results, the team has identified three facts about the mechanisms by which astronomical forces caused changes in climate in those times. (1) The glacial cycle is determined by small differences in the amplitude of variation of the spin axis orientation and the orbit of the Earth. (2) The timing of deglaciation is determined mainly by the position of the summer solstice on its orbit, which is at perihelion, not only by the effect of periodical change of the tilt of the Earth's axis. (3) The timing of the change in the spin axis orientation and the position of the summer solstice on its orbit determines the duration of the interglacial period.

"'As geological evidence from older times comes to light, it is becoming clear that the Earth had a different climatic regime than it does today. We must have a different understanding of the role of astronomical forcing in the distant past," says Takashi Ito from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, a member of this research team who led the discussion on astronomical external forces. "The numerical simulations performed in this study not only reproduce the Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycle well, but also successfully explain the complex effects of how astronomical forcing drove the cycle at that time. We can regard this work as a starting point for the study of glacial cycles beyond the present day Earth.'"

Comment: we need to fully understand glaciation. We are in a period between them. Will there be more? What can we do, if anything to control them? Will God step in?

https://bigthink.com/13-8/big-bang-does-not-explain-cosmic-creation/

"We are often told that the Big Bang is a theory of cosmic creation — that it tells us how the Universe was created out of nothing and went on to evolve into all the galaxies, stars, and planets. The problem with that characterization is that only the second part of it is true. Yes, what we call the Big Bang is a theory of cosmic evolution. But the Inflationary Universe standard model that guides cosmology says nothing about cosmic origins. The birth of space, time, matter, and energy is simply not there. A little history will help us understand why.

"The Big Bang’s first theoretical incarnation originated with Georges Lemaître, a shy Catholic priest and physicist. Lemaître had made a name for himself by showing that Einstein’s general relativity could easily account for Edwin Hubble’s famous finding that the Universe was expanding.

***

"But the basic point about evolution vs creation is the same. Big Bang cosmology does not describe the Universe’s creation. It describes what happens after creation. It does so with spectacular success, giving a detailed roadmap for how a super-high-temperature, super-high-density Universe expanded and cooled, leaving us with everything we see today.

"By itself, the Big Bang never tells us where it all comes from. If you want to know how the Universe was actually created, you need something else, something more. Maybe you want to say the cosmos always existed and we are just one turn of a cyclic Universe. Maybe you want to come up with some exotic new mechanism that can create something from nothing. (Beware of this one, people have stumbled hard on it.) But whatever mechanism you envision, it will be an addition to the Big Bang we have now, because that theory is silent on the question of creation."

Comment: just a reminder the cause of the Big Bang is unknown. All of space and time start with it.

DAVID: The bold is the exact point of his discussion. He accepts no before, before the BB. If our time starts at the BB, we have to accept it. No imagination, as much as you squirm. This is our current state of conjecturing.

dhw: You yourself refuse to accept that there was "no before, before the BB". You insist that there was a conscious mind which engineered the BB. And it is just as likely that your imagined God spent the previous eternity making other universes as it is that he spent past eternity twiddling his metaphorical thumbs doing nothing. The quote above sounds impressive but does not stand up to analysis. The balance to "no end" is "no beginning", i.e. NOT "no before". This would allow for your concept of a first-cause eternal God, so I don't know why you continue to disagree with yourself. But of course we have absolutely no way of knowing whether there was or wasn’t a before, whether space is or is not finite, whether there will or won’t be an end.

DAVID: More of your picket fence conjuring. God either did this only once or more than that. No one knows. Best left at what we know. Our BB happened and started time and space. End of story.

dhw: Since no one knows, of course there can only be “picket fence conjuring”! If our BB happened, it started OUR time and space. That does not mean there was no before. You agree, so what are we arguing about?

A before is only theorizing, therefore etherical. You keep suggesting it might exist. I don't

dhw: You yourself refuse to accept that there was "no before, before the BB". You insist that there was a conscious mind which engineered the BB. And it is just as likely that your imagined God spent the previous eternity making other universes as it is that he spent past eternity twiddling his metaphorical thumbs doing nothing. The quote above sounds impressive but does not stand up to analysis. The balance to "no end" is "no beginning", i.e. NOT "no before". This would allow for your concept of a first-cause eternal God, so I don't know why you continue to disagree with yourself. But of course we have absolutely no way of knowing whether there was or wasn’t a before, whether space is or is not finite, whether there will or won’t be an end.

DAVID: More of your picket fence conjuring. God either did this only once or more than that. No one knows. Best left at what we know. Our BB happened and started time and space. End of story.

Since no one knows, of course there can only be “picket fence conjuring”! If our BB happened, it started OUR time and space. That does not mean there was no before. You agree, so what are we arguing about?

QUOTES: "The basic laws of physics are, we now know, only our present layer of understanding. They are basic only to the extent that nothing more basic has yet been discovered. They are subject to drastic revision. That even our most successful laws are almost guaranteed to give way was established by Kenneth Wilson. He explained that any level of understating at a given energy level rests upon integrating away all higher energy excitations.” (dhw's bold)

"Going back, there is no before before; going out, there is no space beyond space; and going down, there is no end."

DAVID: marvelous point in this philosophical tidbit. We don't know why we were given the items we have to study. Why those starting points? Why the confusing extra particles or is thare something underling we do not yet understand? And Guth is full accepted after all, isn't he? So, if dhw and I imagine previous befores, that is all they are, imagined concepts of possibilities, not really tangible items for intensive discussion.

dhw: The marvellous point is what I have bolded, and the imagined concept of possibilities includes your God and all other explanations of the Big Bang, which itself may be subject to drastic revision. “There is no before before” etc. is equally imagined. You could hardly have a clearer defence of agnosticism, but of course that will not and should not stop us from proposing our theories and testing them with our limited scientific knowledge and our equally limited powers of reason.

DAVID: The bold is the exact point of his discussion. He accepts no before, before the BB. If our time starts at the BB, we have to accept it. No imagination, as much as you squirm. This is our current state of conjecturing.

dhw: You yourself refuse to accept that there was "no before, before the BB". You insist that there was a conscious mind which engineered the BB. And it is just as likely that your imagined God spent the previous eternity making other universes as it is that he spent past eternity twiddling his metaphorical thumbs doing nothing. The quote above sounds impressive but does not stand up to analysis. The balance to "no end" is "no beginning", i.e. NOT "no before". This would allow for your concept of a first-cause eternal God, so I don't know why you continue to disagree with yourself. But of course we have absolutely no way of knowing whether there was or wasn’t a before, whether space is or is not finite, whether there will or won’t be an end.

More of your picket fence conjuring. God either did this only once or more than that. No one
knows. Best left at what we know. Our BB happened and started time and space. End of story.

"Going back, there is no before before; going out, there is no space beyond space; and going down, there is no end."

DAVID: marvelous point in this philosophical tidbit. We don't know why we were given the items we have to study. Why those starting points? Why the confusing extra particles or is thare something underling we do not yet understand? And Guth is full accepted after all, isn't he? So, if dhw and I imagine previous befores, that is all they are, imagined concepts of possibilities, not really tangible items for intensive discussion.

dhw: The marvellous point is what I have bolded, and the imagined concept of possibilities includes your God and all other explanations of the Big Bang, which itself may be subject to drastic revision. “There is no before before” etc. is equally imagined. You could hardly have a clearer defence of agnosticism, but of course that will not and should not stop us from proposing our theories and testing them with our limited scientific knowledge and our equally limited powers of reason.

DAVID: The bold is the exact point of his discussion. He accepts no before, before the BB. If our time starts at the BB, we have to accept it. No imagination, as much as you squirm. This is our current state of conjecturing.

You yourself refuse to accept that there was "no before, before the BB". You insist that there was a conscious mind which engineered the BB. And it is just as likely that your imagined God spent the previous eternity making other universes as it is that he spent past eternity twiddling his metaphorical thumbs doing nothing. The quote above sounds impressive but does not stand up to analysis. The balance to "no end" is "no beginning", i.e. NOT "no before". This would allow for your concept of a first-cause eternal God, so I don't know why you continue to disagree with yourself. But of course we have absolutely no way of knowing whether there was or wasn’t a before, whether space is or is not finite, whether there will or won’t be an end.

QUOTES: "The basic laws of physics are, we now know, only our present layer of understanding. They are basic only to the extent that nothing more basic has yet been discovered. They are subject to drastic revision. That even our most successful laws are almost guaranteed to give way was established by Kenneth Wilson. He explained that any level of understating at a given energy level rests upon integrating away all higher energy excitations.”

"Going back, there is no before before; going out, there is no space beyond space; and going down, there is no end."

DAVID: marvelous point in this philosophical tidbit. We don't know why we were given the items we have to study. Why those starting points? Why the confusing extra particles or is thare something underling we do not yet understand? And Guth is full accepted after all, isn't he? So, if dhw and I imagine previous befores, that is all they are, imagined concepts of possibilities, not really tangible items for intensive discussion.

dhw: The marvellous point is what I have bolded, and the imagined concept of possibilities includes your God and all other explanations of the Big Bang, which itself may be subject to drastic revision. “There is no before before” etc. is equally imagined. You could hardly have a clearer defence of agnosticism, but of course that will not and should not stop us from proposing our theories and testing them with our limited scientific knowledge and our equally limited powers of reason.

The bold is the exact point of his discussion. He accepts no before, before the BB. If our time starts at the BB, we have to accept it. No imagination, as much as you squirm. This is our current state of conjecturing.

"Going back, there is no before before; going out, there is no space beyond space; and going down, there is no end."

DAVID: marvelous point in this philosophical tidbit. We don't know why we were given the items we have to study. Why those starting points? Why the confusing extra particles or is thare something underling we do not yet understand? And Guth is full accepted after all, isn't he? So, if dhw and I imagine previous befores, that is all they are, imagined concepts of possibilities, not really tangible items for intensive discussion.

The marvellous point is what I have bolded, and the imagined concept of possibilities includes your God and all other explanations of the Big Bang, which itself may be subject to drastic revision. “There is no before before” etc. is equally imagined. You could hardly have a clearer defence of agnosticism, but of course that will not and should not stop us from proposing our theories and testing them with our limited scientific knowledge and our equally limited powers of reason.

https://inference-review.com/article/before-before

"More than most laymen, physicists are floored by the idea of the Big Bang. We know too much not to feel mystified. Let me make sure we all understand what we do not understand. The universe began as an isolated event. So far, so good. But it was not an event in either space or time. Time and space began at the Big Bang. There was no time before time began.

"Once this central absurdity is accepted, there remains another. Why did the universe begin with the structures that it has and the laws that govern those structures? So far as we can tell, special and general relativity set the space-time stage, and, with the exception of gravity, quantum mechanics handles the drama that follows. But relativity and quantum mechanics are a house divided. Attempts at their unification, if not frank failures, are not out and out successes either. The Standard Model is now half a century old.1 Its modest name belies the sophisticated achievement it represents. The Standard Model organizes the microstructure of our world into a small set of particles or fields. There are six quarks from which protons and neutrons are constituted. Although two quarks would be more than enough, the other four make exotic, short-lived objects. There are also six leptons, four more than required. “Who ordered that?” The last component of the Standard Model comprises the gauge bosons. They do duty in conveying the electromagnetic, the weak and the strong forces. And there remains the Higgs scalar. If this seems inherently baroque, it is because it is. And yet the Standard Model has met every experimental test, sometimes to a dozen decimal places.

"The basic laws of physics are, we now know, only our present layer of understanding. They are basic only to the extent that nothing more basic has yet been discovered. They are subject to drastic revision. That even our most successful laws are almost guaranteed to give way was established by Kenneth Wilson. He explained that any level of understating at a given energy level rests upon integrating away all higher energy excitations.2

"Going back, there is no before before; going out, there is no space beyond space; and going down, there is no end."

Comment: marvelous point in this philosophical tidbit. We don't know why we were given the items we have to study. Why those starting points? Why the confusing extra particles or is thare something underling we do not yet understand? And Guth is full accepted after all, isn't he? So, if dhw and I imagine previous befores, that is all they are, imagined concepts of possibilities, not really tangible items for intensive discussion.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/methylated-gases-indicator-alien-life

"Gases that organisms produce as they tidy up their environments could provide clear signs of life on planets orbiting other stars, researchers announced January 9 at the American Astronomical Society meeting. All we need to do to find hints of alien life is to look for those gases in the atmospheres of those exoplanets, in images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope or other observatories that could come online soon.

"Barring an interstellar radio broadcast, the chemistry of a remote planet is one of the more promising ways that researchers could detect extraterrestrial life. On Earth, life produces lots of chemicals that alter the atmosphere: Plants churn out oxygen, for example, and a host of animals and plants release methane. Life elsewhere in the galaxy might do the same thing, leaving a chemical signature humans could detect from afar.

***

"At least one type of compound that some organisms produce to protect themselves from toxic elements, however, might provide unambiguous indications of life.

"The life-affirming compounds are called methylated gases. Microbes, fungi, algae and plants are among the terrestrial organisms that create the chemicals by linking carbon and hydrogen atoms to toxic materials such as chlorine or bromine. The resulting compounds evaporate, sweeping the deadly elements away.

"...The fact that living creatures almost always have a hand in making methylated gases means the presence of the compounds in a planet’s atmosphere would be a strong sign of life of some kind, planetary astrobiologist Michaela Leung of the University of California, Riverside said at the meeting.

***

"One of the benefits of looking for the compounds as a sign of life is that it doesn’t require that the life resembles anything like what we have on our planet. “Maybe it’s not DNA-based, maybe it has other weird chemistry going on,” Leung says. But by assuming chlorine and bromine are likely to be toxic generally, methylated gases offer what Leung calls an agnostic biosignature, which can tell us that something is alive on a planet even if it’s utterly alien to us."

Comment: a very clear-cut way to look for alien life. If alien life exists, it will not change my view of an all-powerful God and of our importance to him.

Our solar system was chaotic in the beginning in arranging planet arrangements:

https://nautil.us/were-it-not-for-cosmic-good-fortune-we-wouldnt-be-here-18446/

****

Comment: Planned chaos or plain luck? We are here and there is so much contingency in chance events, it is easily seen as planned by the designer.

We live at the edge of chaos:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGrblWQntrNHDCNqJZjVTMCFmXw

"Chaos sounds mysterious, like something anomalous, a disruption of the normal order of things. But in fact, chaos is everywhere.

***

"You’d think that perturbing a chaotic system just makes the chaos worse, but not so.

"In the years after the first paper on chaos control, a couple of different methods were proposed for it.

***

"If chaos is so common, then why does the world look so orderly? That’s one of the biggest unsolved problems in science at the moment. It seems that naturally occurring adaptive systems increase their complexity until they’re just about barely not chaotic. Naturally occurring adaptive systems are for example living creatures, plants and us, but also institutions and societies. Stuart Kauffman called it poetically the “Edge of Chaos” that we live on, but it’s more technically referred to as “Self-organized Criticality”. (my bold)

"Just why the world is that way, no one really knows. But loosely speaking it seems that if you want to get something done, then both too much order and too much chaos is bad. Or, to put it differently, some chaos in your life is good. You just have to know how to keep it under control."

Comment: the meat of the point is in my bold. Life is a maintained equilibrium by design.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/21cm-magic-length/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm...

"In all the Universe, the most common atom of all is hydrogen, with just one proton and one electron. Wherever new stars form, hydrogen atoms become ionized, becoming neutral again if those free electrons can find their way back to a free proton. Although the electrons will typically cascade down the allowed energy levels into the ground state, that normally produces only a specific set of infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light. But more importantly, a special transition occurs in hydrogen that produces light of about the size of your hand: 21 centimeters (about 8¼”) in wavelength. That’s a magic length, and it just might someday unlock the darkest secrets hiding out in the recesses of the Universe.

***

"The most famous of these transitions occurs in the simplest type of atom of all: hydrogen. With just one proton and one electron, every time you form a neutral hydrogen atom and the electron cascades down to the ground (lowest-energy) state, there’s a 50% chance that the spins of the central proton and the electron will be aligned, with a 50% chance that the spins will be anti-aligned.

"If the spins are anti-aligned, that’s truly the lowest-energy state; there’s nowhere to go via transition that will result in the emission of energy at all. But if the spins are aligned, it becomes possible to quantum tunnel to the anti-aligned state: even though the direct transition process is forbidden, tunneling allows you to go straight from the starting point to the ending point, emitting a photon in the process.

"This transition, because of its “forbidden” nature, takes an extremely long time to occur: approximately 10 million years for the average atom. However, this long lifetime of the slightly excited, aligned case for a hydrogen atom has an upside to it: the photon that gets emitted, at 21 centimeters in wavelength and with a frequency of 1420 megahertz, is intrinsically, extremely narrow. In fact, it’s the narrowest, most precise transition line known in all of atomic and nuclear physics!

***

"Although it’s never yet been done, this gives us a tremendously provocative way to measure the early Universe: by finding a cloud of hydrogen-rich gas, even one that’s never formed stars, we could look for this spin-flip signal — accounting for the expansion of the Universe and the corresponding redshift of the light — to measure the atoms in the Universe from the earliest times ever seen. The only “broadening” to the line we’d expect to see would come from thermal and kinetic effects: from the non-zero temperature and the gravitationally-induced motion of the atoms that emit those 21 centimeter signals.

***

"Again, that same radiation — of 21 centimeters in wavelength — gets produced, and every time we measure that 21 centimeter wavelength localized in a specific region of space, even if it gets redshifted by the expansion of the Universe, what we’re seeing is evidence of recent star-formation. Wherever star-formation occurs, hydrogen gets ionized, and whenever those atoms become neutral and de-excite again, this specific-wavelength radiation persists for tens of millions of years.

"If we had the capability of sensitively mapping this 21 centimeter emission in all directions and at all redshifts (i.e., distances) in space, we could literally uncover the star-formation history of the entire Universe, as well as the de-excitation of the hydrogen atoms first formed in the aftermath of the hot Big Bang.

***

"In all the Universe, there are only a few known quantum transitions with the precision inherent to the hyperfine spin-flip transition of hydrogen, resulting in the emission of radiation that’s 21 centimeters in wavelength. If we want to identify ongoing and recent star-formation across the Universe, the first atomic signals even before the first stars were formed, or the relic strength of yet-undetected gravitational waves left over from cosmic inflation, it becomes clear that the 21 centimeter transition is the most important probe we have in all the cosmos. In many ways, it’s the “magic length” for uncovering some of nature’s greatest secrets. (my bold)

Comment: This precise event in star formation is what has created all the structures in the universe. Fine tuning is simply evidence of a designer

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/from-the-new-atlantis-the-fine-tuning-of...

"Underlying all of these endeavors, however, is a question that has vexed physicists ever since Thales first postulated that water was the unifying principle of the cosmos: What are the most fundamental laws and principles of nature?

"Today, our deepest understanding of the laws of nature is summarized in a set of equations. Using these equations, we can make very precise calculations of the most elementary physical phenomena, calculations that are confirmed by experimental evidence. But to make these predictions, we have to plug in some numbers that cannot themselves be calculated but are derived from measurements of some of the most basic features of the physical universe. These numbers specify such crucial quantities as the masses of fundamental particles and the strengths of their mutual interactions. After extensive experiments under all manner of conditions, physicists have found that these numbers appear not to change in different times and places, so they are called the fundamental constants of nature.

"These constants represent the edge of our knowledge. Richard Feynman called one of them — the fine-structure constant, which characterizes the amount of electromagnetic force between charged elementary particles like electrons — “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.” An innovative, elegant physical theory that actually predicts the values of these constants would be among the greatest achievements of twenty-first-century physics.

***

"Since physicists have not discovered a deep underlying reason for why these constants are what they are, we might well ask the seemingly simple question: What if they were different? What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values?

"There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Or, indeed, anything remotely resembling life.

***

"That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life.

***

"The lack of an explanation for the fundamental constants in the Standard Model suggests that there is still work to be done.

***

"...even a theory free of arbitrary constants would not necessarily explain why the universe gives rise to living beings like us. If these hoped-for deeper equations are anything like all the equations of physics thus far, then they, too, will still require initial conditions. The laws specify how the stuff of the universe behaves in a given scenario; they do not specify the scenario.

***

"...rather than talking about the fine-tuning of the constants, we would consider the fine-tuning of the symmetries and abstract principles. Could it be just a lucky coincidence that they produce in our universe the properties and interactions required by complex structures such as life? This notion “really strains credulity,” according to Frank Wilczek, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross. And as Bernard Carr and Martin Rees wrote in the conclusion of an influential early paper on the fine-tuning problem, “it would still be remarkable that the relationships dictated by physical theory happened also to be those propitious for life.”

***

"The fine-tuning of the universe for life invites us to imagine that our fortuitous cosmic environment is improbable. A random spin of the cosmic dials, it seems, would almost certainly result in a universe unable to create and sustain the complexity required by life. But if probabilities must be dictated by physical theories and are about physical events, as the frequentist believes, then we cannot say that our constants are improbable. We have no physical theory that stands above the constants, informing us that they are unlikely.

***

"Facts can be special to a theory. That is, they can be special because of what we can infer from them. Fine-tuning shows that life could be extraordinarily special in this sense. Our universe’s ability to create and sustain life is rare indeed; a highly explainable but as yet unexplained fact. It could point the way to deeper physics, or beyond this universe, or even to principles beyond the ultimate laws of nature."

Comment: The article is filled with examples of what could go wrong if constants are changed. Multiverses can be calculated but not studied and are dismissed. The anthropic principle is not mentioned but a John Leslie quote is: "[theories]include axiarchism, the view that moral value, such as the goodness of embodied, free, conscious moral agents like us, can explain the existence of one kind of universe rather than another; or, in the words of John Leslie, the theory’s chief proponent, it is “the theory that the world exists because it should.'”