By Michael Guillén
We all now face this burning question screaming for an answer: If our universe is not a coincidence, how do we explain it?
Years ago, at Los Angeles’ Getty Museum, I was given the rare privilege of a personal, after-hours tour of Leonardo da Vinci’s artwork. Standing alone in the quiet, dimly lit gallery, mere inches from a sepia-colored sketch of a human face composed of several dozen perfectly placed wavy lines, I knew without a doubt I was in the presence of pure genius.
After years of being an atheist for whom science was god and the cosmos was a miraculous accident, I now know with equal certainty our universe, too, is a work of pure genius.
Why is that?
In 1973, scientists from around the world gathered in Kraków, Poland, to celebrate the 500th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus. Part of the conference concerned a 50-year-old unsolved mystery called the “large-number coincidences.” The numerical values of natural phenomena large and small – the radius of the observable universe, the charge of an electron, the strength of gravity and so forth – follow a pattern hard to dismiss as mere coincidence.
What could possibly explain this?
Australian physicist Brandon Carter stood before the August gathering and offered a provocative observation that came to be called the Anthropic Principle. The special numerical “coincidences,” he said, are inexorably linked to the one thing that makes our universe special: we and our fellow lifeforms. Without life, the universe would be an unremarkable ghost town.
Carter’s presentation ignited the explosive birth of a brand-new science dedicated to fully answering the 50-year-old mystery: Is it mere coincidence our universe has just the right numerical composition for life to be possible — especially life as complex as humans — or is there more to it than that?