I’m sure some of the physicists can pipe up, but I’ve always found the “Goldilocks perfect” items discussed in this article to be a more compelling argument for ID than anything having to do with specific biological structures like the eye - BTW, let me reiterate that, to my understanding, ID and evolution are not incompatible, though ID isn’t necessarily “science” either:
Physicists Are Asking:
Are Universe’s Traits
Random or Inevitable?
September 16, 2005; Page B1
What if…?
In “counterfactual history,” historians brainstorm about how the course of human events would have changed if history had taken a different turn – if the U.S. had not entered World War I, for example, or if Trotsky had escaped his assassin. The exercise sharpens understanding of which outcomes are the inevitable result of large-scale forces and which are the accidental consequence of contingent events.
Now, scientists are playing the same game. They are asking which numbers in physics and cosmology are accidents and which emerge inevitably from ultimate, unified laws of nature (the inevitability of those laws is a story for another day; for now, we’ll assume the laws have to be what they are).
Must gravity be so much weaker than the “strong force” that holds together atomic nuclei? Must the infant universe have been as free of clumps as it was? Or are those values just accidents? As Einstein asked, “How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?”
Scientists have tripped up before when trying to distinguish accidents from fundamentals. No less an astronomer than Johannes Kepler, who in the early 1600s discovered the laws of planetary motion, believed the number of planets in our solar system, and their orbital distance from the sun, reflect a basic principle – in this case, a geometric one. If you nest the five Platonic solids, such as the cube and the tetrahedron, one inside the other like Russian dolls, he found, the spacings equal the orbital spacings to within 10%. Geometry, he concluded, explains astronomy.
“Kepler didn’t know that the number of planets and their orbits don’t emerge from fundamental principles,” says astronomer Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore. “They are just accidents” of how clumps formed in the dust and gas of our solar system.
Scientists have also made the opposite mistake, assuming that a cosmic parameter cannot be explained by higher principles.
For instance, the density of matter in the universe is just right, in a not-too-high, not-too-low Goldilocks sort of way. If it were a little denser, everything would have recollapsed into one big glob; a little sparser, and the cosmos would be nothing but wisps of gas. Neither condition is particularly hospitable to life. Some cosmologists, therefore, said that the density is what it is because if it were anything else we wouldn’t be here to even wonder about it. That line of thinking is called the anthropic principle.
But appealing to anthropic reasoning amounts to a premature surrender. When the theory called inflation came along to explain how the universe grew exponentially after the Big Bang, it also explained the Goldilocks cosmic density naturally, notes cosmologist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University. Settling for an anthropic explanation, scientists basically threw up their hands and said “it is what it is,” and missed the fact that the magic density emerges from something more basic.
“Anthropic thinking can be very dangerous,” agrees Dr. Livio, leading scientists to give up on finding a better explanation for why the universe has some property. “Anthropic reasoning should not replace the search for fundamental explanations.”
Another number that must be Goldilocks-perfect to allow life is the ratio of the amount of ordinary matter (the stuff in stars, planets and people) to the amount of strange “dark matter.” Ordinary matter and dark matter must be in just the right mix. With too little of the dark variety, matter in the early universe wouldn’t have clumped together and galaxies wouldn’t have formed. With too much dark matter, it all would have formed a gloppy clump.
For this and other cosmic numbers necessary for matter, galaxies, stars and life, the jury is still out on what’s an accident and what’s a result of fundamental physics. Prof. Steinhardt suspects that many, if not all of them, are fundamental, drawn to the values they have because of what he calls an “attractor” built into the fundamental laws of nature.
The possibility that some cosmic numbers are accidents has an interesting implication. Just as the number of planets in a solar system is not a reflection of fundamental laws and so can be different in other solar systems, so cosmic numbers might have other values in other universes. (Although “universe” has traditionally meant one-and-only-one, advances in cosmology suggest there may be multiple “pocket universes,” each a child of its own Big Bang.)
If so, then physicists can hope all they want that the discovery of a grand unified theory of physics “will reveal that all physical parameters are uniquely determined,” Dr. Livio and astronomer Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge, England, wrote recently in Science. But they “may be doomed to failure. … Fundamental constants and laws could be mere parochial bylaws in our cosmic patch.”
In that case, the life-giving properties of our universe are – in the eyes of science – just an accident, and nothing particularly special. Historians have counterfactual history; now cosmologists have counterfactual universes.
