“I refuse to believe that mankind is a random byproduct of molecular circumstance, no more than the result of mere biological chance.” – Alien: Covenant
A LEGO® store opened in my hometown. People lined up for blocks.
There are times that life seems random, chaotic. In our current time, especially, change is moving faster than a Disney™ transvestite can ruin a childhood.
It seems random.
But it’s not.
As I look deeper and deeper into the world, I see that the world, and in fact the entire Universe, is as it is for a reason. That’s a big claim. So why am I certain that this is the case?
Physics, baby.
The Universe is tuned for life. There’s a quantity called the “fine structure constant” which is roughly 1/137. And, there aren’t any units, so I can’t even poke fun at the communist metric system.
What the fine structure constant represents is the relationship between the elementary charge of an electron, how hard it is to make a spark, pi, the speed of lights, and the relationship between wavelength and energy of a photon. So, it’s a lot of stuff to mix up, and I’m surprised the number of lime-flavored PEZ™ bricks in Guatemala isn’t included as well, but I didn’t get a vote.
When photons pass each other do they just wave?
What’s important, though, is that if it were much different than its current value, life doesn’t exist. If the number is much bigger, electrons are bound too closely to the atom this shrinks the size of the atom, making your mother even shorter and denser. I can hear the kids now: “Your momma’s a neutron star.”
Also, chemistry is built around electrons zooming from one atom to the next, so if the electrons don’t move, poof. No steak.
If the fine structure constant is much smaller, important things like carbon and oxygen couldn’t stick together, and, boom. No beer.
Life existing requires this one number being within a fairly narrow range around that 1/137. 4/137 and, zap, no more Toaster Strudels™. Of any flavor.
I wrote a book about using stairs. It’s a step-by-step guide.
Throw everything up randomly, and nothing useful exists. Our Universe is really like Goldilocks was so picky that she had to have her porridge between 112.312°F and 114.452°F (between 4 and 7 liters). Yes, she would have starved.
That’s not all – change the strong nuclear force, the gravitational constant by just a few percent and no useful structures can ever form. Ever.
That’s the big picture. But I’m far from original, and this is far from new knowledge.
The Greeks stole my thunder and had the Fates: Clotho, Larry, and Curly, I think. The Romans had Fortuna: Fortuna was worse than vodka at bringing both prosperity and ruin. The Norns knit the fates of the Vikings while drinking mead and sitting under Yggdrasil. Oh, and Matthew 10:29 would like a word as well:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”
Yes, I know that’s not a sparrow.
I generally leave my house within the same thirty second window every day. I know that’s crappy OpSec, but it does soothe my autism. When I’m delayed, I’ve often had the thought that wasn’t without a reason, good or bad. What seems to be random chance is almost certainly not. If I lose a sock, get a flat, or have “stumble” upon an article, it’s just me being a part of the play.
Now it may surprise you, but my life isn’t perfect. There have been goofs I’ve made, and I’ve had both good and bad luck. But I’ll tell you, it often wasn’t something I could perceive right at that moment. The old Chinese parable comes to mind:
A farmer’s horse runs away, prompting neighbors to lament his bad luck. “Maybe,” he replies. Days later, the horse returns with a herd of wild horses. “Good luck!” the neighbors say. “Maybe,” he says. His son, taming the new horses, falls and breaks his leg— “Bad luck! The neighbors sat. “Maybe,” the farmer shrugs. Soon, war breaks out, and the Emperor’s army comes through town, drafting all the able-bodied young men, but the son’s injury spares him from conscription. “Good luck!” the neighbors exclaim. “Maybe,” the farmer repeats.
See, what the farmer realized is that his son might end up married to Greta Thunberg.
Life’s no crapshoot, though – the place was designed for us. There are no coincidences—our wins, our flops, even that flat tire last Tuesday are part of the plan, and it’s no accident you’re reading this.
And we don’t talk about time travel.
The paradox is, though, you’re not a pawn, you’re also the player. Our actions matter. Life isn’t a cosmic slot machine, but the things we do and experience are lessons and mold us, or mold someone else. And it’s in that narrow window that wonderful things happen.
How do I know that?
We’re here. And so is beer. And so is every other wonderful part of creation.
Except for the metric system. The French can have that one back.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vmgGNe0jouU
Things are never as they seem, even physics. Enjoy the ride, and try to be better next time around.
It is hard to suggest with a straight face that all of this is just a random coincidence. On the other hand, the existence of a God, gods or some other supernatural creative force does not mandate you choose one of the established organized religions.
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!” – Rush
“There are no coincidences…”
Dang. You beat me to one of the signature lines in my books.
There’s so much profundity in this one that I think I’ll quibble about typos. “Sooth” is a somewhat archaic noun meaning “truth.” “Soothe” is a verb, meaning to calm or placate.
And now, with my coffee finished and my own autism placated, I’ll get myself a few km down the road …
Are you a soothe seeker?
Fixed! Thank you!
Everything happens for a reason, so to speak. Being raised a Presbyterian, it’s Predestination in our credo. If you want good outcomes, believe in them and follow your gut instinct.
After I got fired from my marriage back in 1987, every large decision presented to me wasn’t a well thought out choice. I’d say to myself, “if it feels good, it’s the best (better?) option.”
As for France & the metric system, both suck (excepting Frog wines), along with the 10-day week. Ribbit, Ribbit.
This is a deeply profound topic on several levels. I absolutely believe there is something literally supernatural going on here. Where I have trouble is attributing this to an individual being of incredible abilities whose plan is to let me live forever so I can sing its praises. I’m not sure the mind of humans is capable of ever truly understanding the reality of what is going on. But it’s fun to try, and we call that fun activity science.
Intractable mysteries like the fine structure constant and its importance to life have led many scientists into a philosophical hall of mirrors called the Anthropic Principle and the related concept of the multiverse. This has led to a lamentable downgrading of the experimental scientific method, which depends on theory falsification as a path to Truth. How can you run experiments on and theoretically invalidate or confirm something that is imbedded in the very fabric of reality? The Anthropic Principle cannot be falsified; any counterexamples would be in some other universe in a multiverse. The AP would be Topic Number One of The Paradox Club.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/12/is-anthropic-principle-scientific.html
Focusing on the fine structure constant itself is a fascinating topic, right up there with the double slit experiment. It is the focal of quantum electrodynamics or QED, for which the scientific patron saint Richard Feynman won his Nobel Prize in physics. Accordingly, he had a lot to say about it.
“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 man. 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!” ……..Richard P. Feynman (1985). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press. p. 129.
Basically the FSC is the probability that an electron (matter) will absorb a photon of light (energy). You can measure this in a lab. Nobody has ever suggested or discovered a reason why it should be this value. This really bugs physicists – there’s ALWAYS a reason why a probability is what it is. You roll snake eyes one out of every thirty six times because dice have six sides. You get heads half the time because coins have two sides. So…the FSC is telling us something very fundamental and profound about the “shape” of electrons and photons…but what?
Interestingly, there IS a geometry relationship that yields the FSC. Everybody knows that the mysterious number pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference and diameter, which is equivalently twice its radius. So pi = C / 2r. Imagine you have a polygon of n sides instead of a circle. Define the “radius” of said polygon to be the distance from the polygon center to the center of one of its sides.
As noted out there on the internet: “Let P(n) be the perimeter length of an n sided polygon and r(n) be the distance from its centre to the centre of a side. In analogy with the definition of p = C /2r we can define an integer dependent generalization, p(n), of p as p(n) = P(n) / (2r(n)) = n tan(p / n). Let us define a set of constants {a(n1,n2)} dependent on the integers n1 n2 as a(<n1, n2) = a(n1, ∞) p(n1 x n2) /p, ………………………* where a(n1,∞) = cos(p / n1) / n1. The numerical value of a, the fine structure constant, is given by the special case n1 = 137, n2 = 29. Thus a = a(137,29) = 0.0072973525318… The experimental value for a is aexp = 0.007297352533(27), the (27) is +/- the experimental uncertainty in the last two digits."
So maybe n1 = 137, n2 = 29 describes the "dice and coin" shapes out there in quantum land for electrons and photons? Nobody knows. Yet.
As for the element of randomness and luck and such in life, it's always important to remember exactly what life is : various chemicals swimming around and bumping into each other in sacks of water called cells. Sometimes these sacks of water exchange chemicals with other sacks of water they happen to be connected to. That's all life is. If you have a hundred billion or so of these sacks of water connected together, you have a human being. And all they are, all we are, are randomly swirling chemicals in tiny sacks of water.
It's a miracle. Watch the first minute and then the three minutes at 1:10:00 of this film. I'm sure you'll agree.
What did not occur to me until I was older and mature enough to pull my head out of my own arse is that sometimes the universe does not revolve solely around me. I am sure that we’ve all been someone else’s angel or devil at various times, without having so much as a clue. That stranger you bumped into by accident on the sidewalk may well have had the course of his life altered forevermore by your clumsiness, saving him from disaster (or steering him headlong into oncoming traffic).
The flighty chick who dumped me back in freshman year of college broke my heart at the time. But today she is 250 pounds of fugly and I could not possibly thank her enough for freeing me from my self-imposed chains.
Everything happens for a reason, but there is no obligation on fate to clue you in as to why. Sure, you have ‘agency’. But even your ‘agency’ is part of the much, much larger plan.
What made all those thin and svelte girls in the Seventies turn into middle aged land whales?
I read a novel by Charles Sheffield in my younger days that touches on this very concept (I think it was “Sphere’s of Heaven” but it was so long ago, that I can’t remember for sure). Basically an Earth spaceship makes a jump into a parallel universe where some of these universal constants were slightly different than our own. Being a physicist by training, Sheffield fleshed out the details of this alternate universe based on the modified constants and it made for a very interesting story. Many of the changes were very subtle but IIRC, some were life threatening to the crew (and in relation to things we normally take for granted).
Philosophically speaking, I do wonder if this perfect alignment of universal constants is a sign that God created us. But then I also wonder whether God might have created an infinite ensemble of parallel universes–each varying slightly in terms of these universal constants–just as a way to introduce some variety. Life on every parallel universe would be very different in form due to the difference in constants, but creatures living in say “Low G, high R” universe would still be created in “God’s image” just as much as we are.
John, over a life time of choices (often bad) and circumstances that did not turn out the way I anticipated, I have learned to simply wait for the longer term. Many times “bad” circumstances have ultimately turned out for the good.
Defensible argument for God? Not for most. But I have seen too many things work of for my good and His Glory to have any questions.
“Beer is proof God loves us, and wants us to be happy.” – Benjamin Franklin
Meanwhile the eye that you’re using to read this requires hundreds to thousands of unique chemical conduction reactions, the lack of any one of which renders you completely blind.
There are no “shades of gray” there. Either you’re seeing this in living color, or everything is black.
And it doesn’t grow like stacking LEGO blocks. It’s assembled at birth, via DNA, in a chip-coding process that reeks of reams of data so complex we still cannot even fathom it, let alone reproduce it.
Positing this as the development of blind (no pun intended) chance via Evolution is roughly equivalent to positing a redwood growing a branch which became the Golden Gate Bridge, or endless Kansas tornadoes assembling a functional 747 out of random parts.
The universe is too young to accommodate all the necessary failed steps on that pathway.
And that’s just to account for the eye and human vision.
One may as well recount the time Texas Instruments engineers found the first integrated circuit chip, whole and flawlessly functional, in silica strata from a mine in Bavaria in 1958. {Note: that never happened either.}
IOW, holding it occurred by random mutation requires adherence to nonsensical religious dogma slavishly followed far beyond the boundaries of profound mental retardation.
Universities call this belief Darwinian Evolution.
Turn loose the poo-flinging monkeys, upset at this reality.
A (non-verified) story goes that Paul Dirac, author of the elegant and famous Dirac notation describing atomic particles, died and arrived at the Pearly Gates. Now, Dirac, was infamous for his intellectual arrogance and self certitude, say his graduate students. Peter admits Dirac and he promptly asks for an audience with the Allmighty. This is granted and Dirac asks the Creator about all the mysteries of universe and God lays it all out for him. “But”, says Dirac, what about that ludicrous fine structure constant, 1/137. It just makes no sense.” So God lays that out for him as well, whereupon Dirac exclaimed: “No, no, you’re wrong !” Whereupon he was probably condemned to teach physical science to high school freshmen in Calexico for eternity.