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COINCIDENCE ELEVEN: EXPANDING CONSTANTLY, PART TWO

alschroeder

on May 10, 2014

A lot of this is derived from Leonard Susskind's THE COSMIC LANDSCAPE. Anyone who knows how Stephen Weinberg feels about the Anthropic Principle (hint: not a fan) knows that Weinberg was trying to disprove any predictive power of the Anthropic Principle.

Instead, after Hoyle, he made the second successful anthropic prediction–that if the Anthropic Principle held, that the tiny amount the cosmological differed from 0 would be vital to intelligent life being able to develop.
Given Weinberg's antipathy towards the Anthropic Principle, that makes this coincidence all the more startling–and the greatest anthropic coincidence so far. Ten to the 120th power? There are at most 10 to the 88th power particles in the observable universe, for comparison's sake.
Explanations range from positive and negative vacuum energy cancelling each other out (but that has a LOT of problems) to a recent suggestion that the universe is cyclic, but the constant is not conserved, so it gets weaker each time. (Which ALSO has a lot of problems.)
If positive and negative vacuum forces cancelled each other exactly, it might be more understandable. But JUST the amount needed for the seeds of irregularities needed to make galaxies form in the early universe..?
(If the constant were negative, attracting rather than repelling, it couldn't exceed one to 10 to the 120th power, otherwise it adds enough to already-attractive gravity that the whole universe would collapse into a Big CRUNCH.)
If it were the full amount calculations suggest, instead of that infinitismal fraction, the constant would tear apart galaxies, stars, planets, us, even atoms.
This is the same level of "luck" as flipping a coin and getting "heads" FOUR HUNDRED TIMES IN A ROW, according to Paul Davies, in THE COSMIC JACKPOT.
Further, according to John Barrow, THE BOOK OF UNIVERSES, this just wasn't ONE lucky shot. There are "a succession of special epochs in the early universe when the different forces of Nature peel off and continue with different strengths." Each time, the constant should be reset to a much higher value, yet somehow return it to the value that, during each of those epochs, it sets it back to this extremely narrow range–a knife's edge is a ludicrous UNDERstatement–despite all the contributions of the differing other forces.
Lucky us.

I also find it amusing that Einstein, who called the constant "his greatest mistake"—was right, once again.
Next: Quantization. (Just a quick look at the implications for the developement of intelligent life, not the whole theory,honest.)