31 July 2008

Life tuned differently

"You have no idea what life would be like in a universe with different constants," [says Fred Adams]...[He] reckons his results, which will be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, suggest that the "specialness" of our universe could well be an illusion. And this is only the very beginning of what can be probed to undermine the idea that our universe is fine-tuned for life. There are plenty more constants and processes that can be tinkered with, he says.
-- from In the multiverse, stars burn black, a report on work that indicates that very different life forms to the ones we know might be better suited to some other universes in which the range of possible values for three constants involved in the formation of stars are different.

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