Thirty Dials, All Set at Once
Cosmology · · 7 min read · By No Design Editorial
Strengthen the nuclear force by two percent and the universe burns its hydrogen in the first minutes. No hydrogen, no water, no long-burning stars.
The cosmologist Luke Barnes catalogues on the order of thirty independent parameters that have to fall within tight bounds for a universe to hold anything interesting. That number matters more than any single example, because the question is not whether one dial is finely set. It is how many have to be right at once.
Take the strong nuclear force, which binds atomic nuclei. Strengthen it by around two percent and two protons will stick together. That sounds harmless and is catastrophic: hydrogen would have fused into helium wholesale in the first minutes of the universe, leaving none behind. No hydrogen means no water. It also means no long-burning stars of the kind that give a planet billions of stable years.
Gravity has the same character. Turn it up and stars burn out too fast or collapse. Turn it down and they never ignite at all.
Then there is the energy of empty space, the cosmological constant. It sits at a value smaller than basic quantum theory predicts by a factor of around ten to the hundred and twentieth, and it has to, because a larger value would have blown the universe apart before galaxies could gather.
Roger Penrose calculated that the orderly, low-entropy state the universe began in represents a precision of one part in ten to the power of ten to the 123. That is a number you cannot write out, because there are not enough particles in the cosmos to print the zeros.
'He who created seven heavens in layers. You will not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any flaw. So look again: do you see any rifts?' (Quran 67:3)
From Chapter 4: Signs in the Heavens.
Tags: Cosmology, Fine-Tuning, Constants, Quran