Roger's Version Read Free Page A

the background microwave radiation of three K discovered in 1964 has been observed to be uniform within one part in ten thousand, but we’re dealing here with sections of the sky separated by more than ninety times the horizon distance, the distance that light could have travelled at the time the radiationwas emitted. So how could these regions have communicated with one another to achieve the uniformity? It seems impossible. Smoothness: to have galaxies now, you had to have had inhomogeneities in the primal fireball, but just short of absolute smoothness—absolutely smooth, you’d have no clumping; a little bit too much, you’d have much too much. There are figures for all this, but I don’t want to bore you. The fact is, for galaxies lasting billions of years to exist at all is statistically very strange. Flatness: the total energy, that is, everything in the universe, and the expansion rate of the Big Bang had to be initially in precise balance, virtually, for the ratio to be what they observe it to be today, between point one and two point oh. This may seem like a spread, between a tenth and two, but in fact it means that, for the ratio to be this close today, energy density at the time of the Big Bang had to equal the expansion rate to one part in ten to the fifty-fifth power: that’s ten followed by fifty-five zeros. Now, if that’s not a miracle, what is? A little, really little, bit less outward push, and the universe would have collapsed back onto itself in a couple million years—that’s nothing, in cosmic terms. I mean, the human species has been around that long. A little bit more , and the stars and galaxies never could have formed; matter would be blowing away too fast, out the window, so to speak. The odds of its working out the way it did are just about as long as you taking some kind of a supergun and hitting an inch-high target on the other side of the universe, twenty billion light-years away.” The young man held his fingers up to indicate the dimension of an inch. The gap seemed a gunsight between our pairs of eyes.
    I hazily asked, “Isn’t this the same thing as an open versus a closed universe? Didn’t I read a while back that they settled it was open?”
    “They tend to say that; but nobody knows how much dark matter there is in the galaxies, or if the neutrino has mass. The point is, it’s debatable, it’s that close. For it to be that close now, it had to be terrifically close then, at the outset. Why? Why so? These amounts are arbitrary, they could have been anything . And there’s dozens of amounts like them that have to be just what they are in order to give life time to evolve. Take the strong force, which binds the atomic nuclei together. Make it five percent weaker, and the deuteron couldn’t form and there would be no deuterium, which means the main nuclear reaction chain used by the sun couldn’t function; if it were two percent stronger , two protons could stick together and the existence of the di-protons would make hydrogen so explosive the present universe would consist entirely of helium. In either case, we wouldn’t be here, would we? There wouldn’t even be a here to be here in.”
    “But if this God of yours—”
    “Or take the weak force. You know what the weak force is, don’t you, sir?” In his expository excitement he had been forgetting the “sir.”
    “It causes decay in atoms?” I guessed.
    “That’s close enough. It’s about ten-to-the-tenth times weaker than the strong, which is mighty weak; but if it were any weaker, neutrinos couldn’t exert enough pressure on the outer shell of a dying star to bring about a supernova, and without supernova explosions there would be no heavy elements scattered in space, and planets like the Earth wouldn’t exist, and structures like you and me with the carbon and calcium and iron our bodies have to have wouldn’t exist either. Or take the mass of the neutron: if it were only point nine nine eight of its