Is the Universe Fine-tuned for life?

Daniel and Kelly grapple with the implications of arbitrary numbers in our theory, whether they could have had different values, and what it all means. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 1:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Sometimes physics can make you feel a little insignificant. You know, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, it's just one of many tiny rocks orbiting countless suns in zillions of galaxies. And the universe has existed for billions of years before we came along, happily doing its thing without us. But sometimes physics can also make us feel quite special. When we look at the laws of nature and the values of its constants, life seems to depend very strongly on these little details. A tiny tweak here or a change there in life as we know it would be impossible. Stephen Hawking said, quote, "The laws of science as we know them at present contain

• 2:00Daniel Whiteson?

  many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron or the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life," end quote. Is Hawking right? Can it physics tell us if we're special? Can it reveal if the universe seems to have been set up so that life can exist? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily important universe.

• 2:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I'm so glad that the universe is fine tuned for life, including parasitic life.

• 2:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I want to unravel the nature of the universe so we know who to blame for including parasites in it.

• 3:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, we should blame someone for human and livestock and pet parasites. If I could selectively remove those, I would.

• 3:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, right. Mosquitoes, whose idea was that?

• 3:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's a bad idea. Whoever's idea, it's a bad one.

• 3:14Daniel Whiteson?

  I got some notes on the universe.

• 3:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I need to figure out who to give those notes to. So here's my question for you. So we're talking about life in the universe, and often when you see depictions of aliens in movies, or like comics or whatever, they have tentacles. Daniel, do you think aliens are likely to have tentacles?

• 3:37Daniel Whiteson?

  I wonder what the origin of that is. Wow. It must be some early science fiction depiction attempting to describe like life differently. And one thing I love in science fiction is you can see people doing this thing. They are trying. They're aware that life should be different on other planets. We shouldn't just expect humans everywhere. And they're adding little tweaks, like Star Trek is the most hilarious version of this, right? They're like, how about humans but wrinkly foreheads, or humans but pointy ears, you know? It's like the smallest nudge in that direction. It's pretty hilarious, but the idea is right, you know? And so I bet tentacles are just another move in that direction. Do I expect life to have tentacles on other planets? Wow, there's not a less qualified person to answer that question.

• 4:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I don't know anyone else who thinks about aliens as much as you do, Daniel. So I'm sure there's some less qualified person.

• 4:29Daniel Whiteson?

  That's probably true. Well, you know, there is a whole chapter in my new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? Available now at alienspeakphysics.com, where we talk about how aliens might perceive the universe, what they might see, how they might explore it, how they might sense the universe, and if that might lead them to learn different things about the universe and think about it differently. I don't think it matters so much if they're using tentacles or fingers or weird slimy protrusions, but I do think it's interesting how they might see the universe and sense it and think about it differently.

• 5:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, but like, they're gonna need a way to pick up their iPhones to watch cat videos. Surely that's universal.

• 5:10Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, I think there was a lot of time on Earth where life survived without cat videos, Kelly.

• 5:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 5:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's possible. I know. Seems inconceivable.

• 5:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  If I, you know, try to work my way back through the haze of time, it's possible I didn't have an iPhone at some point. So today, we're talking about whether or not the universe is fine tuned for life with or without cat videos. And so...

• 5:34Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is a really fun topic because it touches on physics, of course. It forces us to think about the structure of the universe. How is it organized? But then, my favorite bit, it asks us to wonder what that means. All right, what does it tell us about the nature of the universe? So today, we're gonna be walking the fine line between physics and philosophy, not just the ideas, but their consequences.

• 5:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, amazing. All right. So at physics conferences, do you all get philosophical? Or are you talking about like how to fix the particle collider?

• 6:03Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, no. Philosophy is a bad word at physics conferences.

• 6:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 6:06Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no. Physicists are not interested in these questions, and a lot of them really look down their nose at anybody who is.

• 6:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, what a bummer to learn that.

• 6:14Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, Feynman, for example, said that physicists need philosophers as much as like birds need ornithologists.

• 6:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 6:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, someone's gotta study the birds. No, I do see the point.

• 6:27Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, it's true that philosophy is not the central concern of physicists. Like, let's try to figure out how the universe works. But which questions are interesting definitely comes from philosophy. Why these questions are interesting, what their answers mean, that's all philosophy. And the reason the whole field is fascinating, in my opinion, is because of the philosophical implications. Figuring out what the universe is made of tells you how it works at the most basic level, reveals the true nature of reality. That's all interesting because of philosophy. And I think physicists are all doing philosophy. They just don't realize it. Like, a lot of them hold very strong philosophical opinions, like, yes, these particles are real, even if we weren't looking at them. It feels like a very naturalist, scientific view of the universe,

• 7:12Daniel Whiteson?

  but it's also a strong philosophical opinion about what truth means. It goes well beyond science. So, yeah, I think the physics community should be more open to philosophy.

• 7:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  You gave a much deeper answer than I was expecting. I just wanted to say these things are really fun to think about and to talk about. But yes, I agree with all the stuff that you just said also.

• 7:30Daniel Whiteson?

  You accidentally accessed a Daniel rant, so.

• 7:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you kept it concise. I'm impressed. My Kelly rants can go on for hours, but all right.

• 7:40Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, I was wondering what people out there thought about this question, whether the universe is fine tuned for life. So I reached out to our group of volunteers and asked them to chime in. If you would like to join this group, please write to us at [email protected].

• 7:56Speaker 04

  Life in our universe is inevitable, and I believe that it is also probably plentiful.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that life has evolved within the laws of physics that we have.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  I say no, because the laws of physics were operating long before life existed on our planet.

• 8:13Speaker 07

  The laws of physics aren't as fine tuned as they could be, because I want to have a world where life is even crazier and there's way more connections that an atom can make than what carbon does. That's a good question. Um, maybe, as in all biology, it depends.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  What does that mean? I don't believe so. I believe if anything, it's the other way around. If you changed almost any parameter in physics, life couldn't. Doesn't exist. Life evolved according to the laws of physics. I think that while we might not exist if the laws of physics were different, other people might, and those people would be inclined to look at their laws of physics and think they were fine tuned for them.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Uh, constants of physics that if they were off just by a small margin, there wouldn't be galaxies, elements, or life as we know it.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  You have all of these knobs with very specific numbers associated with them, many of which would destroy all life if altered. So you got me.

• 9:16Daniel Whiteson?

  If by fine tuned for life, you mean the ability to consume other forms of life in often shocking and horrifying ways, then yes.

• 9:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  I do think that the perception of our lives fine tunes our laws of physics. There were so many great answers here and so many answers that made me think these people are really listening. You know, they're like, it's biology, so it depends. Bravo, bravo.

• 9:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Love the in-joke responses. That's nice.

• 9:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  But yeah, in general, great answers here. So let's go ahead and jump in. So you, you wanted to know, is the universe fine tuned for life? What does fine tuned mean in particular?

• 9:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, this is a really interesting question philosophically, and I love that you got to start with like, well, what do you even mean by the words in the question? You know, you're really digging into philosophy. So here, this is inspired by the fact that physics has laws, right? You know, like F equals M A, or you know, the laws of general relativity or special relativity. But there are also numbers, you know, there's things like the speed of light, or there's the gravitational constant. There are numbers there. Sometimes we don't know why those numbers have their values. They're things that we just went and measured about the universe. The speed of light is a great example. Like, we don't know why the speed of light is what it is. It could have been bigger, it could have been smaller, or could it? Is there some constraint there?

• 10:41Daniel Whiteson?

  And these numbers are important, you know, if you change these numbers, you change the conditions of the universe, the nature of our experience in the universe, and of course, therefore, the conditions for life. Take the speed of light, for example, if the speed of light was much, much bigger, then we could see a much larger range of the universe, which sounds great, right? But also, more of the universe could see us. And an alien death ray could travel to Earth much more rapidly if the speed of light was higher. So, you know, if the speed of light was instantaneous, for example, then anywhere in the universe, an alien could point a death ray at us and just obliterate us with no warning. So, you know, it changes the context of life.

• 11:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And people wonder, like, if these values are different and that changes the way life works, then why do they have these values? The ones that seem so well-suited for life as we know it.

• 11:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So that's the essay answer to what does fine-tuned mean? Can we, what would the like, one-sentence answer be? Because I think I lost track a little bit at one point.

• 11:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay. The one-sentence answer is like, there are numbers in the universe, and if you change them a little bit, life doesn't work the way we know that it does. So why do they have these values?

• 11:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. This is why you're such a great professor. Which are the numbers that we care about? Which are the ones that determine if there's life or not?

• 12:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so the example that I gave, the speed of light, is a very intuitive one, very concrete, but it's not actually the right way to think about these numbers. The numbers we should think about are not the numbers that have units in them. We should think about the dimensionless numbers, the ones that are pure numbers. Because if you think about it like the speed of light, it's three times 10 to the eight meters per second, meters per second. It depends on these human things, meters and seconds. And if you changed meters and seconds at the same time, you could keep the speed of light the same. Or if you just changed the length of the definition of a meter, you could change the speed of light. So, you know, you get on fuzzy philosophical grounds if you rest everything on the definition of human units.

• 12:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  You've yet again convinced me that we need philosophy alongside physics.

• 12:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, I think I see where you're coming from, you know, like meters and things like they come in units of 10, probably because we have 10 fingers and time probably, yeah, why, why do we have 60 seconds in a minute, Daniel? That's probably, there's gotta be a human explanation there too, right? The universe didn't tell us there are 60 seconds in a minute?

• 13:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I don't think there's any astronomical connection to length of a minute or a length of a second. You know, the only things determined by astronomy are like the length of a year, how long it takes the earth to go around the sun, and the length of a day, how long it takes the earth to spin. But even those are local quantities, right? Other places in the universe, they won't have the same year or the same day length. So all of these are just human derived constants. And the way to think about this and to wonder like, why is this important, is to imagine whether you could notice if these numbers are changed. You know, imagine, for example, I changed what a meter is, but I also spread out the universe more, right? Or I changed the speed of light and I expanded the universe. You

• 13:47Daniel Whiteson?

  couldn't tell, right? There's no difference. There's no experiment you could do to determine whether I had transformed the universe, made it bigger, but then also increased the length of a meter and the speed of light, or shrunk it. So these numbers, if it's possible to change them and not have any impact on physics or the nature of our experience, then they're not good choices for like, the basic measurements of the universe. So not only do we want to be free of human bias, because that feels weird and local and colloquial and we can't talk to aliens about it. Also, we want to make sure that if we do change these numbers, it really does change the universe in a way that we can measure. That's why we focus on dimensionless numbers, things that have no units in them.

• 14:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is why the meaning of life is 42. It doesn't have any dimension, so it's true anywhere you go.

• 14:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly, exactly. So, bad examples of things that you might think control the universe, but don't actually, are like the example I gave earlier, the speed of light, for the reasons I just described, right? The speed of light, it is a constant, but it has units. And so you can change it, as long as you also change those arbitrary units, and have no impact on the nature of the universe. Another example is like, the force of gravity on earth, right? Yes, the force of gravity affects the way life has evolved, but it actually comes from other constants like the big gravitational constant and the mass of Earth and all sorts of stuff. And of course, it has dimensions. Or other things like Avagadro's number, right? This is a dimensionless quantity, but it's totally arbitrary. It's just a number we made up to feel useful.

• 15:19Daniel Whiteson?

  But we have figured out a bunch of constants of the universe that are dimensionless. And that if you changed any of them would significantly impact the nature of the universe and life on Earth.

• 15:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so it's not just that the number needs to be dimensionless. It also needs to not have been arbitrarily picked by people. And it needs to, why, why can't, why does geometrical not work? Because wouldn't circles be the same anywhere?

• 15:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so you're thinking about like pi, right? Is pi a fundamental nature of the universe? It's a fascinating question, like pi is dimensionless, you're right. And it's not arbitrary, right? We didn't make up pi. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. And that feels really deep, but I don't know that it's physical. You know, it's geometrical. It tells you about the nature of space. And so if, for example, space is curved, pi has a different value. So in that sense, it tells you about the nature of curvature of the universe. But that's already encapsulated in some of the other quantities, I think. So you could argue about pi. I think that's on the edge philosophically. It'd be really cool, though, to talk to aliens about pi and see if like, they have an understanding of it that's deeper than we do.

• 16:31Daniel Whiteson?

  But it's sort of a function of 3D space.

• 16:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  What I'm hearing you say is that if we meet aliens, I can't start dissecting them until after you've asked them about pi. Because I mean, maybe they can tell me about their parasites and we can skip the dissection.

• 16:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's right. I'm sure they'd be very grateful for you to pull whatever those bits are out of their whatever holes.

• 16:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. All right. That's what we're not going to get on the topic of transient anuses again. So what, tell me about what kind of dimensionless numbers are we looking for?

• 17:00Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So it's time to dive into the dimensionless numbers that define the current human understanding of the universe. And there are 26 of them, right? And 26, I know it sounds like a lot, right? It feels like, boy, we have a lot of work to do.

• 17:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa.

• 17:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Because I think the goal is a theory with zero numbers or one number, maybe. I'm not sure you could actually get to zero numbers, but the simpler the theory, the better. Right? But we have 26 numbers.

• 17:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we have 26 numbers in, in what? Is there like an equation that determines if life is fine tuned? What are these 26 numbers all about?

• 17:36Daniel Whiteson?

  These are 26 numbers in our current laws of physics.

• 17:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 17:38Daniel Whiteson?

  We don't have all of physics in one equation. We have a bunch of equations.

• 17:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 17:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And some of those equations have numbers in them that we can't remove or derive or predict. We just measure them. We don't know why they have those values. So two of them relate to the strength of forces. So for example, the fine structure constant is a number that's all over the place in physics. And you can express it in terms of other physical constants. It's the charge of an electron squared divided by h bar times the speed of light.

• 18:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's what I was going to guess.

• 18:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Everybody just talks about that, right?

• 18:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 18:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Back of the hand. Yeah.

• 18:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it's a funny number because you have to sort of put these other physical constants together to get something that has no units. It's a pure number. But this number controls the strength of electromagnetism. Like if you increase the fine structure constant, electromagnetism gets more powerful, meaning that like the force between two electrons at a fixed distance would grow as you increase the fine structure constant.

• 18:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 18:41Daniel Whiteson?

  And this also controls the weak force because remember the weak force is connected to electromagnetism. The Higgs mechanism unifies these things. It's called electro weak symmetry and tells us that the weak force and electromagnetism are actually connected. So this one number determines the strength of electromagnetism. And also with another number, we're going to talk about in a minute. The strength of the weak force. So that's three of the four forces already just from this one number.

• 19:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so that sounds to me like if we tinkered with any of those things, our day to day experiences would be very different. But have we have we already hit on things that like we would die if or we would not be here if they were different?

• 19:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, this number is why we have chemistry. So like if you have notes for the universe, we can already start there because, you know, this controls like electron orbitals, right? This controls how far they are away from the nucleus because electrons in quantum states around the nucleus are there in some sort of balance. They're balancing their energy with the attraction from the nucleus. It's similar in spirit to like an orbit, right? We have a force between them, but you still have velocity. Of course, electrons are not actually orbiting, but it's similar in spirit. And anyway, if you increase the fine structure constant, electron orbitals would shrink, right? Their distance on average of electrons from the nucleus would shrink. It would make atoms harder for them to bond. And if you

• 20:00Daniel Whiteson?

  released it, if you decreased the fine structure constant, then the atoms will grow larger and they would have a looser hold. And so all of chemistry would be different because remember, all of chemistry, the whole periodic table and how atoms interact and their properties, are they bitter? Are they solid? Are they metallic? Do they conduct? Depend on the behavior of electrons around these nuclei and how they like to touch each other or not. And this constant directly affects them. So you tweak this thing even a little bit, all of chemistry is different. Do you still get water? We don't know. Do you still get all sorts of things that allow life to form? You know, DNA and RNA and all the complicated machinery of life, all depends on this number being what it is.

• 20:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So my existential dread is starting to creep up as I think about all of these factors where if they change at all, life falls apart. And when we get back from the break, we'll talk about more of these things upon which our lives depend.

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• 23:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so Daniel, we just finished talking about the fine structure constant.

• 23:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yep.

• 23:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you talked about how if it changed at all, probably chemistry would change, which would mean life as we know it would change. Before we get on to the next one, I'm going to slow us down even farther.

• 23:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 23:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  And say, how do we know for sure that there's not some third or fourth thing out there that we haven't measured that would like accommodate if we made some changes? Or like, maybe we don't really understand what's important. Like, how, I guess, how sure are we that there's not something we're missing here?

• 23:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, there's lots of things we could be missing. It could be, for example, that this number has to be what it is. You know, we have a theory in which this number is a parameter that's not predicted, and we have to go out and measure it. And so in our theory, this number could have other values. Like, if you're at the control panel of the universe, this is just a knob. And according to our theory, you could crank that number up or down, or it could even be changing, right? It's not guaranteed that this thing is fixed. All of our measurements suggest that it's fixed. And when we look back into the history of the universe, we see physics playing out the same way with the same fine structure constant. So it appears to be constant, but that's just a measurement. But it could be that our theory is just incomplete,

• 24:39Daniel Whiteson?

  that there's a better theory out there that's more clever, and it requires the fine structure constant to be this value. It predicts it. I mean, that would be Nobel Prize winning stuff. If you come up with another theory for electromagnetics that predicts this thing and shows why it has to have this particular value, it can't have any other value, boom, you have left us forward 1,000 years or whatever in physics, and you've shown us why this number is what it is. So in that sense, we could be missing something for sure.

• 25:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, great, that's what I was asking.

• 25:10Daniel Whiteson?

  But there's lots of other numbers out there. And the second one also relates to a force. So the other quantum force that's out there is the strong nuclear force. So there's four fundamental quantum forces: electricity, magnetism, and the weak force, which all bundled together into a single electroweak. And then the fourth fundamental force is the strong nuclear force, which holds Protons and neutrons together and also holds the nucleus together and all that good stuff. And this one, we have not yet unified with the other three quantum forces into a grand unified force. People are working on that, but we don't have that figured out yet. So we have a whole separate system of equations. They're inspired by the same machinery. It's all quantum field theory, but it's a different quantum field and the numbers are all different. And it uses weird color charges, whatever.

• 25:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So we got another number there, the strong coupling constant. And that's just a number and it tells us how strong is the strong force. And it's a much bigger number than the fine structure constant, which is why the strong force is called the strong force, because it's so dang strong.

• 26:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And because you physicists aren't super clever with your naming structures.

• 26:12Daniel Whiteson?

  What would you have called the strong coupling constant, Kelly?

• 26:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  The Hulk force or something.

• 26:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Me hold nucleus together.

• 26:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right. Already we've made improvements here. I'm available whenever you guys need suggestions.

• 26:30Daniel Whiteson?

  I'd love to zoom in on the nucleus and see tiny little hulks in there. That would be better than gluons, right? Little hulcons or something?

• 26:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I'm going to copyright that.

• 26:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Little hulky nose. Anyway, this also has a big impact on the nature of life. We were talking a minute ago about the electron and how that determines a lot of the properties of the atom in chemistry. But of course, the nucleus is important too. And in the nucleus, it's the strong force that dominates. You have neutrons, which have no charge and you have protons, which have positive charge. And those protons don't like to be near each other, but the strong force is strong enough to overcome that and keep all those positive charged protons bound together into a nucleus and to create those protons and neutrons in the first place. And that's really the building block of all of matter and everything in the universe. So if the strong force constant was different, you wouldn't get nuclei the same way. You wouldn't get the same isotopes.

• 27:26Daniel Whiteson?

  You might not even be able to manufacture these things in the hearts of stars.

• 27:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, yeah, that sounds pretty fundamental. Why can't we make these things in the hearts of stars?

• 27:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so the strong force determines not just how protons and neutrons. Come together like how you build them, but how they like to stick together with a nuclei that they can form. And so, you know, what happens in a nucleus is you have protons and neutrons, and those things are all neutral from a color charge point of view. So you might wonder like, how does a nucleus stick together anyway? There's all these positive charges from protons and neutral charges from neutrons, and everything is also neutral from a strong force point of view. So how does it stick together? And the answer is residual strong charge, because what's happening is that the quarks in one proton are talking to the quarks inside another neutron. And so

• 28:16Daniel Whiteson?

  those charges are talking to each other. And that only happens if the strong force is strong enough. If you change the nature of the strong force, then you might not get fusion, for example, like what happens when you try to stick two protons together inside the heart of a star to go from hydrogen, which is what the big mang made, to things like helium and lithium and carbon and oxygen and all the stuff that we need for life, is you rely on the strong force to be able to grab those protons when they get close enough and stick them together. So you start changing with the strong force, you're going to change fundamentally the chemistry, the fusion that's happening inside the hearts of stars. And some of these steps in nucleosynthesis are pretty tricky. So to get carbon, for example, requires like a complicated combination of three helium

• 29:00Daniel Whiteson?

  simultaneously. And like, this is very dependent on the strong force. So if you have your hand on that knob, and you like accidentally tweak it a little bit, you could change fundamentally what's happening inside all the stars in the universe.

• 29:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable that you keep talking about chemistry, but we should push on. So this is the strong coupling constant. So for the fine structure constant, you gave us an equation to let us know like what values are going in there. What values go into the strong coupling constant?

• 29:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. The strong coupling constant is just a number. And it's one that we derived sort of later on. So we just measured it directly because we didn't even know about the strong force until, you know, a few decades or almost a century ago. Whereas the fine structure constant comes from electromagnetism, and there were earlier experiments, you know, things to like measure the speed of light. And things to measure H bar. And then we derived most of the theory of electromagnetism in terms of those existing constants. And then later realized, oh, we should put these together in terms of a dimensionless one. So a short answer is, we can't express the strong coupling constant in terms of other constants. Because we realized later on, oh, we should just define the dimensionless thing first. So the fine structure constant is a bit of a historical anomaly.

• 30:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And we sort of came to this way of thinking about things later on.

• 30:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Your initial explanation convinced me that this is important. But the explanation you just gave me for how we determined the value does not convince me that this is a that we have figured out the right way to measure this.

• 30:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we don't know that we figured out the right way, but we have a theory. And that theory has a number in it. We can't predict that number.

• 30:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 30:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, our theory of the strong force would work with different values of this knob. You know, you can make it more powerful. You could make it less powerful. Our theory essentially describes a huge range of possible strong forces. And then we have to go out in the universe and figure out which one do we have? Oh, we have the one where the knob is set to this value. And then, of course, the question, why? What does it mean? And that's the philosophical joy of physics, right? You discover the universe is set up in a certain way. And then you wonder why this way and not some other way? Does it have to be this way? What does it mean that it is this way? But what we know is that this is a number we have no explanation for. Like, it's independent, as far as we know, of the other constant, fine structure constant. You could change the strong coupling constant separately from the fine structure constant.

• 31:23Daniel Whiteson?

  And you would definitely notice, and any change, you would observe. So we can't explain it, and it seems very sensitive to the value that it's set to. So yeah, I think it's a pretty good example of something that's fine tuned.

• 31:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, biology is so complicated. You guys are always like, it depends. But all right, anyway, so if I had to guess some other values that should show up in the constant, I would guess that it would have something to do with like, the mass of the mass particles and the force particles. But those would have dimensions because they'd be mass. And so

• 31:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 31:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I'm wrong.

• 31:58Daniel Whiteson?

  You're mostly right. I mean, you're on the right track.

• 32:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, good.

• 32:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Definitely, the masses of the particles influence the way things happen. You know, if the electron were heavier, if the electron were lighter, you would get different chemistry. If the heavy versions of the up quark were lighter, then they might exist more often and play a role in life, for example. So you definitely need to capture that somehow. But you're right, you also want to avoid dimensionful numbers, things that are related in terms of mass. So we have 12 particle masses for the matter particles, there are 12 fermions. There's six quarks, up, down, charm strange, bottom, top, and six leptons, electron, muon, tau, and then the three neutrinos. So that's 12 numbers, and we can make them dimensionless just by expressing them relative to G,

• 32:45Daniel Whiteson?

  which is the gravitational constant. And so we can sort of cook up a dimensionless number which reflects these masses. Think about it like what we're doing here is expressing the mass ratios more like.

• 32:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  So why is it correct to be looking at the mass relative to gravity as opposed to relative to the average mass of an elephant? Why is gravity the right, the right thing to use to make your, your mass dimensionless?

• 33:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, yeah, because the nature of the universe depends on this ratio. So if you cranked down the gravitational constant and made everything weaker, and then you cranked up the masses to compensate, everything would behave the same gravitationally. And the opposite is true, too. If you made gravity stronger and then you just weakened all the masses, you wouldn't notice. And so it's really this ratio that determines the behavior of these things, whether they decay into each other, all the masses, all this kind of stuff. And so boom, that's 12 numbers right there. And that's kind of a mess. You know, like, these other things like, okay, they're fundamental forces, they determine chemistry. You could begrudge a couple of them. It feels like icky to me that we have 12 numbers here.

• 33:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, it's divisible by two. That feels like a thing that physicists like. It would be ickier to me if there was like, something that had three instead of something divisible by two.

• 34:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, that's true. I mean, I think it feels icky for a couple of reasons. One is, I want this number to be small. Number of numbers. I wish the humanity had a theory with like one, two, three numbers. It would feel like we were on the verge of figuring it all out. So boom, adding 12 in one fell swoop. Ugh, that's like an admission that we're nowhere close to the answer. And I think it also reflects the fact that we haven't solved another mystery, which is where this 12 comes from, which is why are there 12 particles, right? It feels like this is just wrapping up one piece of ignorance into another.

• 34:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's what I was thinking.

• 34:34Daniel Whiteson?

  There should be an explanation for like, why do we have three copies of every particle? What's the relationship between the quarks and leptons anyway? Those are deeper mysteries. And I feel like if those were solved, then we could reduce the number of numbers. But we aren't there yet, so we've got to pay the price and add 12 numbers to our list. And you know, in terms of sensitivity, like obviously the masses of the up, down and electron are very important because those are the things, the building blocks of life as we know it and atomic matter. And you know, me and you and bananas and kittens and all that stuff. The other particles like the top quark, it's super heavy. And so it rarely appears in the universe outside of like high energy collisions at the LHC or alien facilities or cosmic rays.

• 35:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So probably life is less sensitive to that. Like if you cranked up the top quark mass or cranked it down, probably you would still get life pretty much as we know it. Particle physicists might discover it earlier or later. So the Nobel Prize trajectory would be different. Like the specific scientific history. But you could make a pretty good argument that we're not that sensitive to the mass of the top quark, for example.

• 35:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and I think giving out of Nobel prizes is not like a fundamental feature of the universe. I don't know that we need to account for that necessarily.

• 35:51Daniel Whiteson?

  But the other side of this, the strength of gravity is really important. You know, if gravity were a lot weaker, then we wouldn't get it clumping things together. And the whole history of the universe is that we start with very dense plasma, which has some slight overd densities and slight under densities due to quantum fluctuations. And it's dense enough and gravity is strong enough despite its overwhelming weakness to start gathering this stuff together to form. Structure. So, structure in the universe only comes because of gravity. And because gravity is powerful enough to pull this stuff together. If gravity were a little weaker, then you wouldn't get galaxies, you wouldn't get stars and planets. As it is, the gravity of atomic matter, of the protons and neutrons and electrons,

• 36:37Daniel Whiteson?

  wasn't enough to form galaxies and stars and planets. We needed help from the dark matter. Like, if you had a universe without dark matter, just with the normal matter, atoms and whatever, you wouldn't get galaxies and stars and planets 14 billion years into the universe. It would take a lot, lot longer if it ever happened at all. So, it takes not just gravity, but the right amount of gravity and the right density of dark matter to construct this structure that we live on. And the whole framework of the universe depends on gravity having its strength.

• 37:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So now you've convinced me that it's important to have gravity in here instead of the average mass of a big elephant, but...

• 37:16Daniel Whiteson?

  But it also goes the other direction. Like, if gravity was too strong, then we wouldn't have the universe that we know and love. We would have a lot more black holes. It would like pull stuff together more rapidly. We'd have smaller stars because you get more seeding of individual bits. Like, remember the way stars form is you have a huge cloud of gas, and there are little seeds there, little places where gravity is slightly more powerful. But if gravity was everywhere more powerful, you'd get more seeds. And you end up with smaller stars, and smaller stars are colder. Like, our sun is unusually big and hot for the universe. So, in a universe with stronger gravity, you get more black holes and a bunch of small, cold stars. And that would be a very different kind of universe to grow up in.

• 38:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, is the fact that our sun is unusually big and hot, does that kind of explain why life is so rare in the universe? That you kind of need a big, hot sun?

• 38:09Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a hypothesis I've heard, you know, because most of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs. So, why didn't we evolve around a red dwarf? Does that mean that the sun is the only kind of place that life can evolve? Or does it just mean we got lucky and got a bigger, hotter sun? And it's just, you know, in most universes, we would have evolved around red dwarfs. Dwarves seem a little bit more chaotic. They're maybe not as stable as our star is. But this is the problem with N equals one philosophizing, right? We have one example and we're trying to draw conclusions from it. You know how dangerous that is. Like you have two kids, they're very different. I have two kids, they're very different.

• 38:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 38:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Imagine you only had one kid and you're like, well, every kid that I have is like this kid. Obviously, that's not true, you know? And so it's very dangerous to generalize from one example, to assume that this example tells you something inherent about the process you're studying. So it's pretty dangerous. Yeah.

• 39:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Let's take a break and then we'll talk about the last few constants that determine whether or not you get to stay alive.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. How does music actually enter your mind? I'm not sure why or how the music comes to me, but I think people who love music and write music, our brains are just filled with music. Right. Like, we have listened to so much music. We've been a part of so much music. I think of the story that I want to tell, the mood that I want to create with the music, start playing chords, see where they lead me.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Sometimes I'm just not even thinking about music, right? And I hear this little thing and I go, oh, that could be this. You know, you just have to be ready for when the inspiration hits. And it comes. Yeah. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of

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• 41:22Speaker 04

  Toyota, let's go places.

• 41:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, Daniel, we're talking about constants that are necessary for life as we know it. Which constants have we not talked about yet?

• 41:41Daniel Whiteson?

  So there's a few more messy particle physics constants that indicate that particle physicists really haven't figured it out yet. There's three more particle masses we have to account for. This is the Higgs boson mass, the W mass and the Z mass. And the W and the Z mass are the reason that the weak force is weaker than electromagnetism. So the fine structure constant sets the strength of electro-weak force. But part of that electro-weak force is the weak force, and that's weaker because the W and Z masses have the values that they have. We don't know why they are. And according to our theory, there could have been different values there. They tend to be very large, which makes the weak force very weak. In other universes, maybe the weak force is stronger, and they didn't call it the weak force, you know? They called it the mini Hulk force or something like that.

• 42:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's the universe I want to live in.

• 42:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. The Higgs boson is a special mystery, why it has the value that it does. We suspect the Higgs boson mass should be much, much bigger. Our calculations for the Higgs boson mass involve calculating a 10-digit number and then subtracting from it another 10-digit independent number and getting this three-digit mass. The Higgs boson mass is 125 GeV. But like, what are the odds of having these two 10-digit numbers exactly balanced or almost exactly balanced? So the Higgs mass itself, people think, is fine-tuned, and it controls the masses of everything else. And so this whole thing feels like very arbitrary and not well-understood. So that's three more masses.

• 43:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so here too, we've got masses. And so what are they relative to?

• 43:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, good point. They're relative again to the gravitational constant, to big G, so we can keep them dimensionless.

• 43:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, the fact that there's three feels wrong, but we'll, we'll move on.

• 43:22Daniel Whiteson?

  I guess you're not Catholic. You don't find the universe to be three-ish fundamentally, huh?

• 43:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  I was raised Catholic, but I don't go to mass anymore. My apologies.

• 43:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that's probably just because of the fine tuning of the constants. It's not your fault.

• 43:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 43:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So then we have eight more parameters that me and particle physicists haven't figured it out yet. And these are how the fermions talk to each other. We have this complicated mixing parameters that tell us like, how different neutrinos turn from one into another, or how quarks can turn from one flavor into another flavor. And so there's eight numbers there that we just measure in the universe. We can't predict. We don't know why they have their values. I hope alien physicists have figured it out. But again, these things determine the nature of the universe and determine how often particles change from one kind to the other. Probably life is not super sensitive to these because it mostly involves the heavier, rarer particles that we don't see mostly in terms of life.

• 44:19Daniel Whiteson?

  But, you know, we don't understand these things super well. These things could also determine things like the matter, antimatter asymmetry in the universe. I think a lot of this is why we have matter and not antimatter in the universe. So in a universe where these numbers are different, you might have a perfect balance between matter and antimatter. And then in the beginning of the universe, you get no electrons. You get no protons. You just get light as all the matter and antimatter annihilates into photons and that's it. And so it could be that these numbers determine the matter, antimatter asymmetry, which is why we're made of matter. Or, you know, other sets of these values, you could end up with the universe made of antimatter that they of course would call matter. And so it's not well understood, but it could certainly influence the nature of the universe.

• 45:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'll note that as you're talking about these conditions under which we might all be annihilated, you have this weird like sparkle in your eye. But anyway, all right. So just to try to bottom line where we are so far. There is at least 26 dimensionless values in the equations that govern how the universe works, and they vary in the extent to which we think that they are critical for the universe to work as we know it. So some of these you can tinker with a little bit, maybe you'd still get life. And some of these, if you tinkered with them even a teeny tiny bit, it's hard to imagine that you could ever get life.

• 45:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. And the last one is the cosmological constant. This is a big one. This is the one that determines how fast the universe is accelerating. It's our best explanation for dark matter. You know, we think that space has some inherent potential energy. And according to general relativity, if space has potential energy in it, then you get this repulsive accelerating expansion in the universe. And so this is very important for the formation of the universe as we know it. If the expansion rate is too large, then the universe starts to tear itself apart before gravity can do its work and form stars and planets. If this number is too small, the universe collapses due to gravity very early on into one mega

• 46:24Daniel Whiteson?

  black hole. And so you can't tweak the cosmological constant very much, which is the source of all the recent consternation. You know, people have been trying to measure this number and finding that, oh, actually, it doesn't make sense to have it be a single number, and it needs to change over time, because the structure of the universe is very sensitive to this number. And the more we measure about the evolution of the structure, the more we have questions about whether this number actually is a constant or whatever. But the point is, this is a big one. It controls the structure of the universe as we know it. And so, yeah, a lot of these, the universe is very sensitive to. Some of them, you might be able to fudge a little bit. But we're still faced with these questions, like, does this mean the universe is fine tuned? We have all these numbers that we don't have predictions for.

• 47:06Daniel Whiteson?

  If we change them a little bit, life would be different. What does that really mean? And that's where we get into the philosophy.

• 47:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I feel like quite clearly, this is where physicists should start talking about the existence of God and stuff. But I don't see that in the outline. And so, what are the philosophical explanations that? Physicists tackle.

• 47:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So my favorite explanation is, look, we're just not done. There is a theory out there that does explain these things. It tells us why it has to be this way, that connects these masses. And maybe that theory has zero, or maybe it has one parameter. But if we had a deeper insight, or we could crib on alien physics textbooks, you know, or even future humanity, then maybe we just have a deeper understanding. And the universe has to be this way. We just don't get it yet. That's my favorite explanation, because it also inspires more research, you know, it tells us to keep digging, that there are more answers there. And if we keep going, we'll figure it out. So that's why I like that explanation, not because I know that it's true, or I can argue for it like scientifically, but it's

• 48:10Daniel Whiteson?

  the one that inspires us to keep going, because that's the whole motivation of science, right? Let's keep trying to understand, let's keep looking for those explanations. We have no reason to believe those explanations exist, or that the universe is sensible at some fundamental level anyway. I've sort of operating just on the assumption that it is. And so it's worked well so far. Let's keep going.

• 48:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I like that explanation because it's actionable. It's like, okay, we don't know, but let's not give up. Let's keep trying. And so, all right, so we've got, that's explanation one. What's explanation two?

• 48:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Explanation two is that there is no explanation. These are just random, right? And they could have any value. And we happen to live in a universe where these values are the ones that we need for life. And so life evolved according to the laws of physics to fit into it. It sort of shapes life, you know, some other weird form of life couldn't have evolved in these universe, because our form of life is very sensitive to the chemistry and the structure of the universe and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, there's an explanation here that's called the anthropic principle, that says that we wouldn't be here if those fine tuned constants weren't fine tuned to the numbers needed for life to be as we know it. So in most of those universes where you change those numbers, you don't

• 49:22Daniel Whiteson?

  get Daniel and Kelly having a podcast conversation about it. You don't get people writing philosophy papers about it. It's not a question, because we're not there to ask it. And so this sort of says, well, look, this is a big coincidence, but there's no deeper explanation.

• 49:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  But so, doesn't that kind of depend heavily on what we know? Like how, how we understand how things worked out? Like, if you tinkered with these values, maybe you wouldn't end up with. Galaxies, you would end up with like one big flat disk that we all live on or something. And maybe we'd all have tentacles and, and how, how much are we biased by?

• 49:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Is tentacles a bad outcome or a good outcome? I'm trying to figure that out.

• 50:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I don't know. I could see it going either way.

• 50:06Daniel Whiteson?

  It's hard to watch cat videos when you only have tentacles. You know, can you use your suckers to control the phone? I don't know how that works.

• 50:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, you could get attachments for your suckers, maybe, and that could help you with your phone. But, but we're getting off topic here, but, but so, so how, I mean, how do we know that the universe couldn't just look so different that it's like beyond our ability to comprehend?

• 50:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's another explanation, right? So wrapping up the anthropic explanation, I agree with you. And the thing I don't like about it is that it tells us to stop looking. It says, look, there are no answers, so don't waste your time. And it can hide real explanations. Like there are sometimes real explanations. And if you just say, look, I don't know, and this is just the way it is. And we wouldn't be here to ask these questions otherwise, then it stops you from finding true answers. So I'm not a big fan of the anthropic explanation. And another answer to this question is that we don't know what life would be like in these other scenarios. It's true that if you tweak the fine structure constant, you get very different chemistry. And therefore you would have to have different life, but we don't know what that life would be like.

• 51:10Daniel Whiteson?

  And if that life would also ask this question, and it presumes, the structure of this question presumes that like, we are some sort of outlier, we are unusual in our complexity and intelligence. It might be that we're kind of simple and boring. And then if you changed one of these fine structure constants, one of the other constants, you get a much more interesting universe filled with life and they're all super intelligent. They figured out fast on light travel and like, we're a bad outcome. We're like, oh, boy, you know, I hope we don't get that universe, right? And so it call comes down to the question you asked earlier, basically like, do aliens have tentacles? We can't imagine life as we don't know it. It's very hard for us to think outside the box. We don't know where the box edges are, what assumptions we're making that we don't even realize.

• 51:55Daniel Whiteson?

  And it's very, almost impossible to calculate. You might say, well, Daniel, you're a physicist. Change the numbers, run the simulations. Tell us what those universes are like, right? That involves so much complexity. We can't even tell you like how stars form. We don't understand the nature of the universe. We have to just go out and look, right? We can't start from these principles and tell you how our universe should look because we can't do the calculations. It's too complicated. You know, we can't like predict what chicken soup tastes like from particle physics.

• 52:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 52:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Too many numbers. We can't predict the weather. We don't understand turbulence. And so I can't then change these numbers and tell you what the universe would look like. It's too complicated. We're not capable of doing that. So we don't know, right? And you're right that it could be that in most settings of these numbers, we get interesting stuff, life and intelligence and happiness and parasites and tentacles, good or bad. So yeah, we don't know. And I think that's what you were asking. And so then let's just wrap up. The last possible answer is like, well, maybe they are fine tuned. You know, maybe we're living in a simulation or God exists and they have set these numbers to be the way they are. And discovering these things means that we're special. And I don't like that answer because it makes us sound special. And anything that makes us sound special is too tempting and too seductive and makes

• 53:12Daniel Whiteson?

  me very skeptical.

• 53:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm with you there.

• 53:14Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So thanks everyone for coming along on this ride between physics and philosophy, exploring the nature of the universe, what it all means, what we've learned and what we have yet to figure out.

• 53:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  See you all next time.

• 53:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 53:36Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 53:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 53:49Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 53:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 54:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 54:09Speaker 02

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• 54:36Speaker 06

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• 55:04Speaker 02

  Hey, what's up? This is Kelvin Washington from The I Couple with Rob Parker and Kelvin Washington. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shoptoyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 55:43Daniel Whiteson?

  My fresh detector.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Uh, your what?

• 55:46Daniel Whiteson?

  There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 55:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Apparently, we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off.

• 56:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.