GDR writes:
Can you not see how irrational it is to believe that we are nothing but that life exists, against all odds, because of blind mindless good luck.
Against all odds is kinda hard to say. I'm just cruising by and saw this discussion. So if you folks here have already discussed the Fine Structure Constant, alpha = ~1/137.036, then nevermind. Or visit
Quanta Magazine . From the link:
As fundamental constants go, the speed of light, c, enjoys all the fame, yet c’s numerical value says nothing about nature; it differs depending on whether it’s measured in meters per second or miles per hour. The fine-structure constant, by contrast, has no dimensions or units. It’s a pure number that shapes the universe to an astonishing degree — “a magic number that comes to us with no understanding,” as Richard Feynman described it. Paul Dirac considered the origin of the number “the most fundamental unsolved problem of physics.”
There are some physicists who propose many worlds with all kinds of properties, some near ours (resulting in worlds that last a while), some not (and this results in a short lifespan for those worlds) and these are spontaneously being created at zillions of times per planck-second. Some even argue that every possibility of a quantum outcome actually is happening tight now.
While I cannot go along with these ideas out of sheer disbelief, I could also argue that all it takes is 1 world like ours, so against all odds suddenly becomes near certainty, if all kinds of worlds are created out of this *nothingness*.
The link mentions that
Physicists have more or less given up on a century-old obsession over where alpha’s particular value comes from; they now acknowledge that the fundamental constants could be random, decided in cosmic dice rolls during the universe’s birth. But a new goal has taken over.
Quite at odds with Einstein's "God doesn't roll dice"!!
Indeed, even Feynman wrote:
Richard Feynman, one of the originators and early developers of the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), referred to the fine-structure constant in these terms:
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e – the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.)
Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by humans.
You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed His pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out – without putting it in secretly!
— R.P. Feynman
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Death to #TzarVladimirtheCondemned!
Enjoy every sandwich!
- xongsmith, 5.7dawkins scale
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