The Fine-Tuning of the Universe, Solar System and Earth
* A Fun RSR List Show: For this Thanksgiving weekend, a special rebroadcast. In our List of the Fine-Tuned Features of the Universe, Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart quotes leading scientists and their astounding admission of the uncanny and seemingly never-ending list of the just-perfect finely-tuned parameters of the physical features of the Earth, the solar system, and the entire cosmos. This program is brought to you by God, maker of heaven and earth and other fine products!
* The Finely Tuned Parameters of the Universe: Barrow & Tipler, in their standard treatment, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, admit that "there exist a number of unlikely coincidences between numbers of enormous magnitude that are, superficially, completely independent; moreover, these coincidences appear essential to the existence of carbon-based observers in the Universe." Examples include the wildly unlikely combination of:
- there is the same number of electrons as protons to a standard deviation of one in ten to the thirty-seventh power, that is, 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (37 zeros)
- the 1-to-1 electron to proton ratio throughout the universe yields our electrically neutral universe
- all fundamental particles of the same kind are identical (including protons, electrons, down quarks, etc., even, in QED, photons!)
- energy exactly equals mass (times the conversion factor of c²)
- the electron and the massively greater proton have exactly equivalent opposite charges