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Manu Joseph became a journalist because he didn’t have to crack any objective-type entrance exam to be one. His first novel, Serious Men, is the winner of The Hindu Best Fiction Award. It is one of Huffington Post’s 10 Best Books of 2010, and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2010. He is the editor of Open. EMAIL AUTHOR |
Despite our affection, the Moon is leaving us. It has always been drifting away. One night, it will not be there in the sky. We imagine that night with the mild ache of losing a dependant. After all, the Moon is very small. It would fit into the United States. But the truth is that as the Moon recedes, it will leave a violent Earth. Without the counter force of tides caused by the Moon, the Earth would rotate almost three times faster, which in turn would create daily winds with speeds over 100 miles an hour. Every day, a giant storm would travel across the Earth. When the Moon was born, it was much closer to the Earth. If there were primal oceans, the infant Moon would have caused giant waves. Say the Moon were ten times closer than where it is now, tides over a kilometre high would have smashed inland and receded every few hours. The point is that the miraculous location of the Moon and, for that matter, the Sun, are crucial for the survival of life. Millions of years ago, when they were more hostile, they created the conditions for microscopic life to emerge. Slowly, as they turned more amicable, they created the conditions for human beings to arrive. This is weird.
That our star and our satellite, against all odds, ended up exactly in those spots in space that enabled life on Earth to emerge, multiply and evolve is only part of a long, mysterious string of such cosmic favours. If the cosmological constant were minutely different, if the nuclei of atoms were not so stable, if many other fundamental aspects of the universe were even slightly different, there would have been no life. Or at least, life as we know it. It seems, a precarious array of forces is aligned to support life. This has inspired a controversial notion among several highly regarded scientists, a notion that we are not just lucky to be here, that life is one of the pursuits of the universe, that the universe is the way it is because it has to support life. This argument is loosely called the anthropic principle. Other scientists hate this hypothesis because having life at the heart of the universe appears to endorse a discredited, but vastly influential idea: God. Opponents of the anthropic principle concede that life is an improbability, it should not have occurred, but it obviously has, it looks like an accident, we have no other explanation, but we might if you please give us more time (and funds, of course).
In the middle of all this, religious types overtly or discreetly claim the existence of God by pointing to the mystery shrouding almost everything about the universe and the inability of science to answer why we are here. That is one thing about God lovers which is very hard to understand—why have they usurped mystery? Why do they feel that our general ignorance is the ultimate proof of God? In fact, if there were God (the carrot-and-stick God as imagined by Mother Teresa, Ajmal Kasab and others), then isn’t it natural that He would have explained everything very clearly in one of those many books He has ghostwritten?
Leonard Susskind, a founder of string theory, which is an aggregate of several theories that try to solve why the laws of physics operate in one way in large objects and in another way in subatomic particles, has claimed in his book, The Cosmic Landscape, that there are trillions of universes and ours is just one of them. The laws of physics, he argues, would be different in different universes. Somewhere else, if you fall off a building, the acceleration due to gravity acting on you would be about six metres per second instead of about ten. Among the trillions of universes, we just happen to live in one where the laws of physics come together to support organic life. Therefore, our life is not a paranormal coincidence. If there are trillions of universes, it is highly probable that one of them could be truly absurd enough to let us happen.
But then, where are the other universes, those trillions minus one? Oh, they are hidden in ‘other dimensions’. Only a handful of mathematicians can go there. I’m told high grade heroine, too, can take you.
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Your article is proof that sometimes, just sometimes, a rhetoric question can actually cause a lot more harm than anyone would imagine. You mention only the two extreme scenarios -- the anthropic principle or the fine-tuned universe, and the multiverse hypothesised by string theory. Is life either the culmination of a string of cosmic favours in one universe or are we living in just ONE of the universes that evolved to support life, among a trillion others?
The answer, quite clearly, is neither. The reason our universe seems so fine-tuned to our existence is because WE have adapted to the universe, and not vice-versa. The reason we THINK it is fine-tuned for our existence is because of delusions of grandeur, or because of our half-assed, wonder-eyed egotism.
Our existence is quite precarious -- we cannot breathe in water (although there wasa time when we could) or on the high mountains. The only habitable portion in this universe is but a microscopic speck in the cosmic scheme of things. Our universe is more suitable for the production of black-holes and not life. We're merely an accident.
You know, the religious types already suffer from selective hearing, which prevents them from hearing what they do not wish to hear. And when an article in a magazine like this does not even offer the larger picture, it just makes for flimsy fodder for the irrational side.
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Right on, Sukrit. The religious nutjobs have got it ass-backwards. The earth wasn't created so we could live comfortably; we just happen to exist because we are the result of millions of years of evolution and have adapted to the environment. Does that take too much effort to figure out?
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