Fine Tuned For Life

One of the most controversial questions in cosmology is why the fundamental constants of nature seem fine-tuned for life. One of these fundamental constants is the fine-structure constant, or alpha, which is the coupling constant for the electromagnetic force and equal to about 1/137.0359. If alpha were just 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars wouldn't be able to make carbon and oxygen, which would have made it impossible for life as we know it to exist. Now, results from a new study show that alpha seems to have varied a tiny bit in different directions of the universe billions of years ago, being slightly smaller in the northern hemisphere and slightly larger in the southern hemisphere. 

One intriguing possible implication is that the fine-structure constant is continuously varying in space, and seems fine-tuned for life in our neighborhood of the universe. 


Human understanding of nature through science, rational reasoning, and mathematics points to a deep and still-unexplained link between life, mind, and cosmos. Somehow, the universe has engineered not only its own self-awareness, but its own self-comprehension. It is hard to see this astonishing property of (at least some) living organisms as an accidental and incidental by-product of physics, a lucky fluke of biological evolution. Rather, the fact that mind is linked into the deep workings of the cosmos in this manner suggests that there is something truly fundamental and literally cosmic in the emergence of sentience.   Paul Davies



But everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun,  bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and—in this universe, anyway—life as we know it would not exist.


Consider just two possible changes. 


Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. 


If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve.


There are many such examples of the universe’ life-friendly properties so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.  We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,  Linde says.  Strikingly, the temperature of space is everywhere the same, just 2.7 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. How could different regions of the universe, separated by such enormous distances, all have the same temperature?  In the standard version of the Big Bang, they couldn’t. The universe as a whole has been cooling ever since it emerged from the fireball of the Big Bang. 


But there’s a problem: For all of it to reach the same temperature, different regions of the universe would have to exchange heat, just as ice cubes and hot tea have to meet to reach the uniform temperature of iced tea. But as Einstein proved, nothing, including heat, can travel faster than the speed of light. In the conventional theory of the Big Bang, there simply hasn’t been enough time since the universe was born for every part of the cosmos to have connected with every other part and cooled to the same temperature.

Sciences Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory :  Discover Magazine
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences-alternative-
to-an-intelligent-creator () " 
by Tim Folger ;  published online November 10, 200

The Shape of the Universe as Mapped by NASA


NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite rocketed into Earth orbit on Nov. 18, 1989, and quickly revolutionized our understanding of the early cosmos. Developed and built at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., COBE precisely measured and mapped the oldest light in the universe -- the cosmic microwave background. 


For these results, COBE scientists John Mather, at Goddard, and George Smoot, at the University of California, Berkeley, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics. The mission ushered cosmologists into a new era of precision measurements, paving the way for deeper exploration of the microwave background by NASA's ongoing WMAP mission and the European Space Agency's new Planck satellite.

The Expansion of the Universe

Images shows Universe from Beginning of Time
Illustration: Time Line of the Universe Credit: NASA/WMAP

From this diagrammed image we can see, "Quantum Fluctuations" at the far left side.  This point represents the very, very beginning of everything just after the Big Bang.  At the very beginning everything was densely packed into a point size that about a million would fit on a pin head .  So, from the beginning the universe energy has been evolving, expanding, and dancing it's way into being and providing.   S. Magyar

THE BEGININGS

13.9 Billion Years Ago
The Origin of the Universe:


Thirteen  plus billion years ago, there was no Universe only  sacred  Energy.


From that place that was no-place,
From that time that was no-time,
From the thing that was no-thing,


All the energy that  would ever exist in the entire course of time erupted from  a  point of what we call energy, smaller than a grain of dust.  It is unknown...it is the ultimate mystery  of this whole story.  The laws of physics which applied in the begining are not clear,  so it is difficult to know where energy might have come from.  There are several theories  of how the Universe began.  So how could it have begun?

Where did energy come from?  The short answer is  energy  has always been with us since the beginning of the universe and always will be with us.   It just changes form all around us. 

As the Universe expanded after its origin in a Big Bang, the hot soup of fundamental particles (such as free protons and electrons) started to cool down.  This allowed electrons and protons to pair up and form "neutral hydrogen atoms," (i.e. hydrogen atoms with one electron and one proton).  


This process of pairing up is called "Recombination" and it occurred about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.  As the free electrons were now bound to protons, light could travel freely since it was no longer stopped by frequent scattering off the free electrons. 

Until around 400 million years after the Big Bang, the Universe was a very dark place.  There were no stars, and there were no galaxies. Scientists would like to unravel the story of exactly what happened after the Big Bang and reveal the story of the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the Universe.