MULTI-TUNING
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2810-multi-tuning
Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards THE PRIVILEGED PLANET HOW OUR PLACE IN THE COSMOS IS DESIGNED FOR DISCOVERY page 206
In most analyses of the fine-tuning of the force strengths and constants of nature, only one parameter is adjusted at a time (to make the problems more tractable). This would correspond to changing one dial at a time on our Universe-Creating Machine while leaving the other dials unchanged. Even taken individually, each of these examples of fine-tuning is impressive. But in the real universe the values of all the constants and force strengths must be satisfied simultaneously to have a universe hospitable to life. So for instance the strong nuclear force must be set to certain narrow limits for stars to produce carbon and oxygen in comparable amounts, for beryllium-8 to remain bound at least 10-16 seconds, to keep the deuteron bound, to allow a minimum periodic table for life, to keep the light abundant isotopes stable, and to keep the di-proton unbound. The range for each of these parameters is narrow. The range within which all of them are satisfied simultaneously is much smaller, like the bull’s-eye in the middle of an already tiny target. Add the required range for the weak force strength and the bull’s-eye becomes smaller still, and so on for the other forces. Add the specific requirements of simple life (water and carbon chemistries) and it becomes even smaller, and more so for advanced and then technological life. Eventually, we will have a set of equations, each describing a different constraint on the laws of nature that allows them to permit life.
Arguably the most impressive cluster of fine-tuning occurs at the level of chemistry. In fact, chemistry appears to be “overdetermined” in the sense that there are not enough free physical parameters to determine the many chemical processes that must be just so. Max Tegmark notes, “Since all of chemistry is essentially determined by only two free parameters, and Beta [electromagnetic force constant and electron-to-proton mass ratio], it might thus appear as though there is a solution to an overdetermined problem with more equations (inequalities) than unknowns. This could be taken as support for a religion-based category TOE [Theory Of Everything], with the argument that it would be unlikely in all other TOEs” (Tegmark, 15). Tegmark artificially categorizes TOEs into type 1, “The physical world is completely mathematical,” and type 2, “The physical world is not completely mathematical.” The second category he considers as motivated by religious belief.
(Determining this complete set of equations may just be the single most important goal of science. We’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)32 While physicists still lack the theoretical know-how to do the complete calculation, it’s unlikely that simultaneously changing several physical constants or fundamental forces will lead to a universe as habitable as ours. Astronomer Virginia Trimble observed early in the debate on fine-tuning:
The changes in these properties required to produce the dire consequences are often several orders of magnitude, but the constraints are still nontrivial, given the very wide range of numbers involved. Efforts to avoid one problem by changing several of the constraints at once generally produce some other problem. Thus we apparently live in a rather delicately balanced universe, from the point of view of hospitality to chemical life.
John Gribbin and Martin Rees reach a similar conclusion:
If we modify the value of one of the fundamental constants, something invariably goes wrong, leading to a universe that is inhospitable to life as we know it. When we adjust a second constant in an attempt to fix the problem(s), the result, generally, is to create three new problems for everyone that we “solve.” The conditions in our universe really do seem to be uniquely suitable for life forms like ourselves, and perhaps even for any form of organic chemistry.
Changes in the relative strengths of gravity and electromagnetism affect not only cosmological processes but also galaxies, stars, and planets. The strong and weak nuclear forces determine the composition of the universe and, thus, the properties of galaxies, stars, and planets. As a result, we ultimately can’t divorce the chemistry of life from planetary geophysics or stellar astrophysics. Although we have only scratched the surface, it should be clear that
there are many examples of “cosmic-scale” fine-tuning in chemistry, particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Most published discussions of such fine-tuning are limited to the requirements for life, but cosmic finetuning
extends well beyond mere habitability.
https://3lib.net/book/5102561/45e43d
Luke Barnes: A Fortunate Universe Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos page 274
Claim: All these fine-tuning cases involve turning one dial at a time, keeping all the others fixed at their value in our Universe. But maybe if we could look behind the curtains, we’d find the Wizard of Oz moving the dials together. If you let more than one dial vary at a time, it turns out that there is a range of life-permitting universes. So the Universe is not fine-tuned for life.
Reply: This is a surprisingly persistent myth and one with no basis in fact whatsoever. There never was a time when fine-tuning investigations varied just one parameter. The original anthropic principle paper by Brandon Carter in 1974 identified a peculiar relationship between the mass of the proton, the mass of the electron, the strength of gravity, and the strength of electromagnetism. Stars can transport energy from their nuclear burning cores to their surface in two different ways – in the form of radiation, or via convective currents in which warmer gas rises and colder gas falls in cycles. In universes that subscribe to Carter’s coincidence, both kinds of stars are possible. Carter conjectured that life requires both kinds for heavy element production and planet formation. Physicists William Press and Alan Lightman showed in 1983 that the same coincidence must hold for stars to emit photons with the right energy to power chemical reactions. This is quite a coincidence, given the number of cosmic dials one must tune for the energy of a photon of light emerging from a star to be roughly equal to the energy of chemical bonds. The whole point of this relation and many more like them, with which the early anthropic literature is entirely concerned, is that they relate a number of different fundamental constants. More recent work has shown that spinning multiple dials is usually as destructive as spinning one. Suppose we spin the up quark, down quark, and electron mass dials. Protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus are made of these three particles: two up quarks and one down quark make a proton, and one up quark and two down quarks make a neutron. Think of Figure 1 as a three-dimensional cube, where one dial sets the up quark mass, one sets the down quark mass, and the other sets the electron mass. When you’ve dialed in the masses, the stylus is at a particular point in the block.
When physicists talk of ‘parameter space’, this is something like what we have in mind. What are the ranges of our dials? Or, to put it another way, how wide is our block? On the lower end, particles can have zero mass – the photon, for example. What about the upper end? A particle with a mass equal to the Planck mass is the maximum mass that our theories could possibly handle. The Planck mass is roughly 24,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (2.4 × 10^22) times the mass of the electron! This mass is so large that, to help illustrate the interesting bits in our block, we need to use a logarithmic scale. It’s an easy idea: instead of each click of the dial moving the masses in the usual 0, 1, 2, 3 ... manner, we instead multiply by ten: ...,.0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, ... In a specific model Stephen Barr investigated, the lower mass limit set by something called ‘dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry’ to be about 60 orders of magnitude – 10^60 – smaller than the Planck mass. We will do the same for each side of our block.
We’ll carve off parts of the block that we have identified as being unsuitable for life.
For example, in Figure 2 we’ve carved off the disastrous Delta-plus-plus universe a), with one stable element and no chemical reactions, as well as the simply appalling Delta-minus universe b), with one element and one chemical reaction. In fact, we’ll go a step further by carving off the hydrogen-only universe c) and the ‘worst universe so far, the neutron universe d) – no elements, no chemistry. Stable atoms have a few more regions to avoid. We’ll carve off the parts where protons and neutrons don’t stick to create nuclei. We’ll carve off the regions where the electron can be captured by the nucleus, reducing atoms to piles of neutrons. We’ll carve off the parts where anything with the chemistry of hydrogen is unstable.
Figure 3 shows what remains. Further, our dials are messing with stars’ nuclear fuel and the source of their internal pressure. We’ll carve off the region with no stable stars at all, as identified by Fred Adams. We’ll also ensure that the first product of stellar burning (the deuteron) is stable and that its production releases energy rather than absorbing it since this would upset the gravity vs. thermal energy balance in a star.
Figure 4 shows what survives our slicing and dicing. Finally, we carve off universes in which the Hoyle resonance fails to allow stars to produce both carbon and oxygen, which leads to
Figure 5. What remains is a thin shaft of life-permitting universes extending to small values of the up quark mass, surrounded by a vast wasteland. Remember that we needed to use a logarithmic scale; we can now see why. If we used a normal (linear) scale from zero to the Planck mass e), we would need a block of at least 10 light-years (a hundred billion kilometers) high for the life-permitting region visible to the human eye. The problem with this reaction is obvious. Sure, there are many dials. But there are also many requirements for life. Adding more dials opens up more space, but most of this space is dead. We see no trace whatsoever of a vast oasis of life. Life is similarly confined in cosmological parameter space. Max Tegmark, Anthony Aguirre, Martin Rees and Frank Wilczek (2001) find eight constraints on seven dials f) . Again, life is left to huddle on a tiny island. (Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist, and Rees is the Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society.) We’d love to plot all seven dimensions for you – blasted two-dimensional paper! This myth may have started because, when fine-tuning is presented to lay audiences, it is often illustrated by describing what happens when one parameter is varied. Martin Rees, for example, does this in his excellent book Just Six Numbers. Rees knows that the equations of fine-tuning involve more than one parameter – he derived many of those equations.
Two fallacies must be avoided.
The first is focusing on the shape of the life-permitting island, rather than its size. As we saw above, the life-permitting island is not a single blob. In general, it could snake through the dimensions of parameter space. We could say that life is possible for a range of values, but this would be misleading. We still need to carefully adjust the dials. A random spin of each dial is unlikely to result in success.
The second fallacy is comparing the life-permitting range to the value of the constant in our Universe. Here’s an analogy. Suppose you throw a dart at a board and it lands inside the bullseye, 3 mm from the exact center (see Figure 6). Not bad, eh? Not so fast, says your friend. You could have landed twice as far from the center and still scored a bullseye. So your throw is only ‘fine-tuned’ within a factor of 2 ... not very impressive at all! Something has gone wrong here. It is the size of the bullseye compared to the size of the wall – not compared to where your dart landed – that makes a bullseye evidence of either your dart-throwing prowess or your determination (despite your terrible aim) to keep throwing until you hit the bullseye. Increasing the mass of the down quark by a factor of 6 results in the atom-, chemistry-, star- and planet-free neutron universe. This might seem like plenty of room. While ‘a factor of 6’ is fine for stating the limits of the fine-tuning region, it gives a misleading impression of its size. Compared to the highest energies that particle accelerators have reached, the life-permitting range is less than one in a hundred thousand. Compared to the Planck mass, it is one part in 10^20. The range of possible values of a constant (in a given theory) is often far larger than the actual value.
https://3lib.net/book/3335826/1b6fa8
Nucleosynthesis - evidence of design
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3141-nucleosynthesis-evidence-of-design
a) The Delta-Plus-Plus Universe:
Let’s start by increasing the mass of the down quark by a factor of about 70. Down quarks would readily transform into up quarks (and other stuff), even inside protons and neutrons. Thus, they would rapidly decay into the new ‘most stable’ title-holder, our old friend the Δ++ particle. We would find ourselves in the ‘Delta-plus-plus universe’. As we’ve seen, the Δ++ particle is a baryon containing three up quarks. Unlike the proton and neutron, however, the extra charge, and hence electromagnetic repulsion, on the Δ++ particles makes them much harder to bind together. Individual Δ++ particles can capture two electrons to make a helium-like element. And this will be the only element in the universe. Farewell, periodic table! The online PubChem database in our Universe lists 60, 770, 909 chemical compounds (and counting); in the Δ++ universe, it would list just one. And, being like helium, it would undergo zero chemical reactions.
b) The Delta-Minus Universe:
Beginning with our Universe again, let’s instead of increase the mass of the up quark by a factor of 130. Again, the proton and neutron will be replaced by one kind of stable particle made of three down quarks, known as the Δ− . Within this Δ− universe, with no neutrons to help dilute the repulsive force of their negative charge, there again will be just one type of atom, and, in a dramatic improvement on the Δ++ universe, one chemical reaction! Two Δ− particles can form a molecule, assuming that we replace all electrons with their positively charged alter-ego, the positron.
c) The Hydrogen Universe:
To create a hydrogen-only universe, we increase the mass of the down quark by at least a factor of 3. Here, no neutron is safe. Even inside nuclei, neutrons decay. Once again, kiss your chemistry textbook goodbye, as we’d be left with one type of atom and one chemical reaction.
d) The Neutron Universe:
If you think the hydrogen universe is rather featureless, let’s instead increase the mass of the up quark by a factor of 6. The result is that the proton falls apart. In a reversal of what we see in our Universe, the proton, including protons buried in the apparent safety of the atomic nucleus, decay into neutrons, positrons and neutrinos. This is by far the worst universe we’ve so far encountered: no atoms, no chemical reactions. Just endless, featureless space filled with inert, boring neutrons. There is more than one way to create a neutron universe. Decrease the mass of the down quark by just 8 percent and protons in atoms will capture the electrons in orbit around them, forming neutrons. Atoms would dissolve into clouds of featureless, chemical-free neutrons. What about the other particle of everyday stuff, the electron? Since the electron (and its antiparticle, the positron) is involved in the decay of neutron and proton, it too can sterilize a universe. For example, increase its mass by a factor of 2.5, and we’re in the neutron universe again. The situation is summarized in Figure below.
e) Planck mass: https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/p/Planck+Mass
f) Fine-tuning of atoms: https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2763-fine-tuning-of-atoms
Figure 1 A three-dimensional cube, representing ‘parameter space’. To help visualize the possible values of the masses of the fundamental particles, we imagine choosing a point in the block. As we spin the dials and choose different masses, our stylus moves through the block. Where can life flourish?
Figure 2 Carving off failed universes, Stage 1. Starting with the block of Figure 1, we carve off the Delta-plus-plus, Delta-minus, hydrogen-only and neutron-only universes, in which there is at most one chemical element and one possible chemical reaction.
Figure 3 Carving off failed universes, Stage 2. We remove regions of the block where atomic nuclei fail to be stable at all
Figure 4 Carving off failed universes, Stage 3. If a universe fails to support stable stars, then it is cut out of our block.
Figure 5 Carving off failed universes, Stage 4. A special property of carbon nuclei (the Hoyle resonance) allows stars in our Universe to make both carbon and oxygen. We remove from the block universes in which this fails.
Figure 6 A dart lands inside the bullseye. It could have landed twice as far away from the center and still scored a bullseye. Does that mean that the throw was only ‘fine-tuned’ to within a factor of 2, or that scoring a bullseye was a fifty-fifty chance? Obviously not! The smallness of the bullseye compared to the size of the wall – the set of places that the dart could have landed – could be evidence of dart-throwing prowess.
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2810-multi-tuning
Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards THE PRIVILEGED PLANET HOW OUR PLACE IN THE COSMOS IS DESIGNED FOR DISCOVERY page 206
In most analyses of the fine-tuning of the force strengths and constants of nature, only one parameter is adjusted at a time (to make the problems more tractable). This would correspond to changing one dial at a time on our Universe-Creating Machine while leaving the other dials unchanged. Even taken individually, each of these examples of fine-tuning is impressive. But in the real universe the values of all the constants and force strengths must be satisfied simultaneously to have a universe hospitable to life. So for instance the strong nuclear force must be set to certain narrow limits for stars to produce carbon and oxygen in comparable amounts, for beryllium-8 to remain bound at least 10-16 seconds, to keep the deuteron bound, to allow a minimum periodic table for life, to keep the light abundant isotopes stable, and to keep the di-proton unbound. The range for each of these parameters is narrow. The range within which all of them are satisfied simultaneously is much smaller, like the bull’s-eye in the middle of an already tiny target. Add the required range for the weak force strength and the bull’s-eye becomes smaller still, and so on for the other forces. Add the specific requirements of simple life (water and carbon chemistries) and it becomes even smaller, and more so for advanced and then technological life. Eventually, we will have a set of equations, each describing a different constraint on the laws of nature that allows them to permit life.
Arguably the most impressive cluster of fine-tuning occurs at the level of chemistry. In fact, chemistry appears to be “overdetermined” in the sense that there are not enough free physical parameters to determine the many chemical processes that must be just so. Max Tegmark notes, “Since all of chemistry is essentially determined by only two free parameters, and Beta [electromagnetic force constant and electron-to-proton mass ratio], it might thus appear as though there is a solution to an overdetermined problem with more equations (inequalities) than unknowns. This could be taken as support for a religion-based category TOE [Theory Of Everything], with the argument that it would be unlikely in all other TOEs” (Tegmark, 15). Tegmark artificially categorizes TOEs into type 1, “The physical world is completely mathematical,” and type 2, “The physical world is not completely mathematical.” The second category he considers as motivated by religious belief.
(Determining this complete set of equations may just be the single most important goal of science. We’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)32 While physicists still lack the theoretical know-how to do the complete calculation, it’s unlikely that simultaneously changing several physical constants or fundamental forces will lead to a universe as habitable as ours. Astronomer Virginia Trimble observed early in the debate on fine-tuning:
The changes in these properties required to produce the dire consequences are often several orders of magnitude, but the constraints are still nontrivial, given the very wide range of numbers involved. Efforts to avoid one problem by changing several of the constraints at once generally produce some other problem. Thus we apparently live in a rather delicately balanced universe, from the point of view of hospitality to chemical life.
John Gribbin and Martin Rees reach a similar conclusion:
If we modify the value of one of the fundamental constants, something invariably goes wrong, leading to a universe that is inhospitable to life as we know it. When we adjust a second constant in an attempt to fix the problem(s), the result, generally, is to create three new problems for everyone that we “solve.” The conditions in our universe really do seem to be uniquely suitable for life forms like ourselves, and perhaps even for any form of organic chemistry.
Changes in the relative strengths of gravity and electromagnetism affect not only cosmological processes but also galaxies, stars, and planets. The strong and weak nuclear forces determine the composition of the universe and, thus, the properties of galaxies, stars, and planets. As a result, we ultimately can’t divorce the chemistry of life from planetary geophysics or stellar astrophysics. Although we have only scratched the surface, it should be clear that
there are many examples of “cosmic-scale” fine-tuning in chemistry, particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Most published discussions of such fine-tuning are limited to the requirements for life, but cosmic finetuning
extends well beyond mere habitability.
https://3lib.net/book/5102561/45e43d
Luke Barnes: A Fortunate Universe Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos page 274
Claim: All these fine-tuning cases involve turning one dial at a time, keeping all the others fixed at their value in our Universe. But maybe if we could look behind the curtains, we’d find the Wizard of Oz moving the dials together. If you let more than one dial vary at a time, it turns out that there is a range of life-permitting universes. So the Universe is not fine-tuned for life.
Reply: This is a surprisingly persistent myth and one with no basis in fact whatsoever. There never was a time when fine-tuning investigations varied just one parameter. The original anthropic principle paper by Brandon Carter in 1974 identified a peculiar relationship between the mass of the proton, the mass of the electron, the strength of gravity, and the strength of electromagnetism. Stars can transport energy from their nuclear burning cores to their surface in two different ways – in the form of radiation, or via convective currents in which warmer gas rises and colder gas falls in cycles. In universes that subscribe to Carter’s coincidence, both kinds of stars are possible. Carter conjectured that life requires both kinds for heavy element production and planet formation. Physicists William Press and Alan Lightman showed in 1983 that the same coincidence must hold for stars to emit photons with the right energy to power chemical reactions. This is quite a coincidence, given the number of cosmic dials one must tune for the energy of a photon of light emerging from a star to be roughly equal to the energy of chemical bonds. The whole point of this relation and many more like them, with which the early anthropic literature is entirely concerned, is that they relate a number of different fundamental constants. More recent work has shown that spinning multiple dials is usually as destructive as spinning one. Suppose we spin the up quark, down quark, and electron mass dials. Protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus are made of these three particles: two up quarks and one down quark make a proton, and one up quark and two down quarks make a neutron. Think of Figure 1 as a three-dimensional cube, where one dial sets the up quark mass, one sets the down quark mass, and the other sets the electron mass. When you’ve dialed in the masses, the stylus is at a particular point in the block.
When physicists talk of ‘parameter space’, this is something like what we have in mind. What are the ranges of our dials? Or, to put it another way, how wide is our block? On the lower end, particles can have zero mass – the photon, for example. What about the upper end? A particle with a mass equal to the Planck mass is the maximum mass that our theories could possibly handle. The Planck mass is roughly 24,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (2.4 × 10^22) times the mass of the electron! This mass is so large that, to help illustrate the interesting bits in our block, we need to use a logarithmic scale. It’s an easy idea: instead of each click of the dial moving the masses in the usual 0, 1, 2, 3 ... manner, we instead multiply by ten: ...,.0.01, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, ... In a specific model Stephen Barr investigated, the lower mass limit set by something called ‘dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry’ to be about 60 orders of magnitude – 10^60 – smaller than the Planck mass. We will do the same for each side of our block.
We’ll carve off parts of the block that we have identified as being unsuitable for life.
For example, in Figure 2 we’ve carved off the disastrous Delta-plus-plus universe a), with one stable element and no chemical reactions, as well as the simply appalling Delta-minus universe b), with one element and one chemical reaction. In fact, we’ll go a step further by carving off the hydrogen-only universe c) and the ‘worst universe so far, the neutron universe d) – no elements, no chemistry. Stable atoms have a few more regions to avoid. We’ll carve off the parts where protons and neutrons don’t stick to create nuclei. We’ll carve off the regions where the electron can be captured by the nucleus, reducing atoms to piles of neutrons. We’ll carve off the parts where anything with the chemistry of hydrogen is unstable.
Figure 3 shows what remains. Further, our dials are messing with stars’ nuclear fuel and the source of their internal pressure. We’ll carve off the region with no stable stars at all, as identified by Fred Adams. We’ll also ensure that the first product of stellar burning (the deuteron) is stable and that its production releases energy rather than absorbing it since this would upset the gravity vs. thermal energy balance in a star.
Figure 4 shows what survives our slicing and dicing. Finally, we carve off universes in which the Hoyle resonance fails to allow stars to produce both carbon and oxygen, which leads to
Figure 5. What remains is a thin shaft of life-permitting universes extending to small values of the up quark mass, surrounded by a vast wasteland. Remember that we needed to use a logarithmic scale; we can now see why. If we used a normal (linear) scale from zero to the Planck mass e), we would need a block of at least 10 light-years (a hundred billion kilometers) high for the life-permitting region visible to the human eye. The problem with this reaction is obvious. Sure, there are many dials. But there are also many requirements for life. Adding more dials opens up more space, but most of this space is dead. We see no trace whatsoever of a vast oasis of life. Life is similarly confined in cosmological parameter space. Max Tegmark, Anthony Aguirre, Martin Rees and Frank Wilczek (2001) find eight constraints on seven dials f) . Again, life is left to huddle on a tiny island. (Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist, and Rees is the Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society.) We’d love to plot all seven dimensions for you – blasted two-dimensional paper! This myth may have started because, when fine-tuning is presented to lay audiences, it is often illustrated by describing what happens when one parameter is varied. Martin Rees, for example, does this in his excellent book Just Six Numbers. Rees knows that the equations of fine-tuning involve more than one parameter – he derived many of those equations.
Two fallacies must be avoided.
The first is focusing on the shape of the life-permitting island, rather than its size. As we saw above, the life-permitting island is not a single blob. In general, it could snake through the dimensions of parameter space. We could say that life is possible for a range of values, but this would be misleading. We still need to carefully adjust the dials. A random spin of each dial is unlikely to result in success.
The second fallacy is comparing the life-permitting range to the value of the constant in our Universe. Here’s an analogy. Suppose you throw a dart at a board and it lands inside the bullseye, 3 mm from the exact center (see Figure 6). Not bad, eh? Not so fast, says your friend. You could have landed twice as far from the center and still scored a bullseye. So your throw is only ‘fine-tuned’ within a factor of 2 ... not very impressive at all! Something has gone wrong here. It is the size of the bullseye compared to the size of the wall – not compared to where your dart landed – that makes a bullseye evidence of either your dart-throwing prowess or your determination (despite your terrible aim) to keep throwing until you hit the bullseye. Increasing the mass of the down quark by a factor of 6 results in the atom-, chemistry-, star- and planet-free neutron universe. This might seem like plenty of room. While ‘a factor of 6’ is fine for stating the limits of the fine-tuning region, it gives a misleading impression of its size. Compared to the highest energies that particle accelerators have reached, the life-permitting range is less than one in a hundred thousand. Compared to the Planck mass, it is one part in 10^20. The range of possible values of a constant (in a given theory) is often far larger than the actual value.
https://3lib.net/book/3335826/1b6fa8
Nucleosynthesis - evidence of design
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3141-nucleosynthesis-evidence-of-design
a) The Delta-Plus-Plus Universe:
Let’s start by increasing the mass of the down quark by a factor of about 70. Down quarks would readily transform into up quarks (and other stuff), even inside protons and neutrons. Thus, they would rapidly decay into the new ‘most stable’ title-holder, our old friend the Δ++ particle. We would find ourselves in the ‘Delta-plus-plus universe’. As we’ve seen, the Δ++ particle is a baryon containing three up quarks. Unlike the proton and neutron, however, the extra charge, and hence electromagnetic repulsion, on the Δ++ particles makes them much harder to bind together. Individual Δ++ particles can capture two electrons to make a helium-like element. And this will be the only element in the universe. Farewell, periodic table! The online PubChem database in our Universe lists 60, 770, 909 chemical compounds (and counting); in the Δ++ universe, it would list just one. And, being like helium, it would undergo zero chemical reactions.
b) The Delta-Minus Universe:
Beginning with our Universe again, let’s instead of increase the mass of the up quark by a factor of 130. Again, the proton and neutron will be replaced by one kind of stable particle made of three down quarks, known as the Δ− . Within this Δ− universe, with no neutrons to help dilute the repulsive force of their negative charge, there again will be just one type of atom, and, in a dramatic improvement on the Δ++ universe, one chemical reaction! Two Δ− particles can form a molecule, assuming that we replace all electrons with their positively charged alter-ego, the positron.
c) The Hydrogen Universe:
To create a hydrogen-only universe, we increase the mass of the down quark by at least a factor of 3. Here, no neutron is safe. Even inside nuclei, neutrons decay. Once again, kiss your chemistry textbook goodbye, as we’d be left with one type of atom and one chemical reaction.
d) The Neutron Universe:
If you think the hydrogen universe is rather featureless, let’s instead increase the mass of the up quark by a factor of 6. The result is that the proton falls apart. In a reversal of what we see in our Universe, the proton, including protons buried in the apparent safety of the atomic nucleus, decay into neutrons, positrons and neutrinos. This is by far the worst universe we’ve so far encountered: no atoms, no chemical reactions. Just endless, featureless space filled with inert, boring neutrons. There is more than one way to create a neutron universe. Decrease the mass of the down quark by just 8 percent and protons in atoms will capture the electrons in orbit around them, forming neutrons. Atoms would dissolve into clouds of featureless, chemical-free neutrons. What about the other particle of everyday stuff, the electron? Since the electron (and its antiparticle, the positron) is involved in the decay of neutron and proton, it too can sterilize a universe. For example, increase its mass by a factor of 2.5, and we’re in the neutron universe again. The situation is summarized in Figure below.
e) Planck mass: https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/p/Planck+Mass
f) Fine-tuning of atoms: https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2763-fine-tuning-of-atoms
Figure 1 A three-dimensional cube, representing ‘parameter space’. To help visualize the possible values of the masses of the fundamental particles, we imagine choosing a point in the block. As we spin the dials and choose different masses, our stylus moves through the block. Where can life flourish?
Figure 2 Carving off failed universes, Stage 1. Starting with the block of Figure 1, we carve off the Delta-plus-plus, Delta-minus, hydrogen-only and neutron-only universes, in which there is at most one chemical element and one possible chemical reaction.
Figure 3 Carving off failed universes, Stage 2. We remove regions of the block where atomic nuclei fail to be stable at all
Figure 4 Carving off failed universes, Stage 3. If a universe fails to support stable stars, then it is cut out of our block.
Figure 5 Carving off failed universes, Stage 4. A special property of carbon nuclei (the Hoyle resonance) allows stars in our Universe to make both carbon and oxygen. We remove from the block universes in which this fails.
Figure 6 A dart lands inside the bullseye. It could have landed twice as far away from the center and still scored a bullseye. Does that mean that the throw was only ‘fine-tuned’ to within a factor of 2, or that scoring a bullseye was a fifty-fifty chance? Obviously not! The smallness of the bullseye compared to the size of the wall – the set of places that the dart could have landed – could be evidence of dart-throwing prowess.
