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Pastimes : Neocon's Seminar Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (594)	5/12/2001 4:45:34 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1112

I think we both share a curiosity about the universe. Would you agree with this statement from "The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms" by Marcus Chown "To this day, Hoyle is the only person to have made a successful prediction from an anthropic argument in advance of an experiment." Chown states that Hoyle made the most outrageous prediction in scince. It has been confirmed by Willy Fowler. Fred Hoyle, a British astrophysicist, considering this problem, reasoned anthropically. We know that there is an abundance of carbon in the universe (hey, we ARE an abundance of carbon in the universe). It follows that there must be something about carbon which makes the transition from beryllium so favorable that significant numbers of nuclei can make it within 10-17 seconds. Hoyle proposed a previously undiscovered energy level of carbon that would resonate with the energies of helium and beryllium within a star. He also persuaded a skeptical team of nuclear physicists to test his prediction. He was right. The new energy level of carbon was just four percent higher than the He-4, Be-8 combined energy, at just the right level for resonance. The incredible heat inside a star could provide this small energy difference. Much higher, and even stellar temperatures would not provide the impetus for reaction. Any lower, and the excess of energy between the He and Be nuclei would cause them to bounce apart once again. Oxygen, too, has a resonance close to its stellar formation requirement. Oxygen’s, though, is 1% below threshold rather than 4% above, and so oxygen cannot be easily manufactured. Carbon’s 4% cushion provides all our supplies of this life crucial element. Oxygen’s 1% cushion is the only thing that keeps our carbon here.[3] Hoyle’s work led him to a natural conclusion: I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars. If this is so, then my apparently random quirks have become part of a deep-laid scheme. If not then we are back again at a monstrous series of accidents.[4] Hoyle’s convictions are based on an even greater chain of “quirks” of nature, far too detailed to mention individually. Lee Smolin, Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University, provides a compelling summary in his book The Life of the Cosmos. He imagines that some of the fundamental constants of the standard model, the masses of the fundamental particles and the relative strengths of three of the forces between them, were assigned randomly at the start of the universe. Then he asks how likely such a universe would be to develop long-lived stars. It’s a simple piece of mathematics: The answer, in round numbers, comes to about one chance in 10^229. To illustrate how truly ridiculous this number is, we might note that the part of the universe we can see from the earth contains about 10^22 stars which together contain about 10^80 protons and neutrons. These numbers are gigantic, but they are infinitesimal compared with 10^229. In my opinion, a probability this tiny is not something we can let go unexplained. Luck will certainly not do here; we need a rational explanation of how something this unlikely turned out to be the case.[5] The anthropic principle ksharpe.com