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Showing posts from April, 2023

Did the Universe Know We Were Coming?

I'm not sure who originally said it, but it's become a truism in science that "the universe has every appearance of having been created". The physical constants that control the structure of matter have to be extraordinarily finely balanced for the universe to be stable and supportive of life. The probability of them being in the right proportions is so infinitessimally small that it's hard to conceive how it could have happened by accident. It appears - as Freeman John Dyson put it - that “the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” This apparent 'fine tuning' of the universe to support life is often presented as evidence for a creator. It's also said that appearances can be deceptive. And of course, that's true. But it's normally one particular sense that's deceived, as in the case of an optical illusion. And the most of the time appearances are not deceptive at all. The grass appears to be green, and it is. My hair seems