Considering perfect order of the universe, there must have been extremely sensitive values
in motion during the expansion of the Big Bang. Can you tell us about the order that
began with the Big Bang, such as the cosmological constant in others, and how precise its values
are?
Yeah, so the fine-tuning problems, well, some people call them problems, the fine-tuning
issues of the universe, are really well-known and widely discussed in the physics community.
I would say one of the things that is very compelling to me is an argument made, I'm
going to steal a lot from a philosopher named Robin Collins, who is also from Pennsylvania,
and at a meeting a couple of years ago, he gave a very nice talk. One of the problems
with the fine-tuning is not just that there are a lot of improbable numbers that have to
be exactly so where we couldn't live, because in many versions of understanding fine-tuning,
people will say, well, it's not really a problem at all, because if you just have a lot of universes,
and a lot of tries, then eventually, just by random chance, you will get the things that
you need. And so, the analogy would be, suppose that you have a target for an arrow, and you
randomly shoot arrows everywhere, and if you have enough tries, eventually, you will get
one that hits the target. And so then, you add to this, and you say, well, now we find
there's not just one fine-tuning, but there are multiple fine-tuning parameters. You know,
the ratio of the gravity and the electrical force, the expansion rate of the universe,
the speed of light, all of these things have to be pretty much exactly what they are, or
life couldn't exist. And so, some people would say, well, that's not really a problem, because
again, if you have all of these different chances, all of these different universes, then eventually,
you know, you'll be able to hit all these different targets. But, in that kind of thinking, you're
sort of thinking that you have one target, you shoot the arrows in a bunch of different
ways, and you hit one target, then you go on to the next target, and you do the same thing
until you get all these answers. The problem is, with the fine-tuning parameters that we know
of, they all have to be true simultaneously. You can't just have one be true, and the other
ones not be true. You have to have all of them true at the same time. And the laws of physics
don't allow you, if you change one, you oftentimes will change some of the other parameters as well.
So, the analogy that Robin Collins was discussing was imagining that you have a whole bunch of
hoops, of circles, and maybe a hundred of them, and you have to shoot an arrow and satisfy
all 100 of these hoops by shooting an arrow through. Now, if the hoops are all in different
places, there's no arrow that will ever go through all 100, because you shoot this one,
you missed that one. The only way to do it is to have all 100 hoops lined up in a straight
line, so that you can satisfy all of the constraints simultaneously. Well, then you have to ask,
what are the odds of having all the hoops in line? Right? So, even if I had lots of universes,
and I'm shooting arrows in all different directions, if the hoops are not all lined up, no arrow will
ever satisfy all of the 100 at the same time. So, you can now say, even in a universe where
you have multiple attempts, if the hoops are not lined up, you can't get something that
satisfies all the conditions at the same time. So, we have a question, a larger question,
which is, how is it even possible that there is any type of universe that could allow life?
Because all of these conditions have to be satisfied at the same time, or else, if one
of them is wrong, then none of it works.