Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life

A Superb Book on the Physics and Philosophy Surrounding Single and Multiple Universes

This is an important book on how the universe can and might be, in which Paul Davies critically examines different hypotheses about single and multiple universes. His book illuminates the most critical issues of physics and philosophy (and of some biology) underlying our understanding of Science and Religion. He has called himself an agnostic, and he does not argue for religious beliefs. This newest book by Davies is somewhat more technical than his other books but is still well within the general readership level. Davies updates and expands upon all previous overviews I know of in the ways the universe can begin and remain in existence, enriching previous accounts especially in his discussion of multiple universes. Also particularly fascinating is his discussion of dark mass and dark energy, which constitute 96% of our (potentially) observable universe and which we cannot see and about which we can make only indirect observations. Throughout the book, Davies flags the free parameters, or "constants of nature", some 20 of them counting force coupling constants and the masses of elementary particles, which, in the standard models of nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology, must be exquisitely fine-tuned to yield a single universe capable of supporting life. As an alternative to this fine-tuning, physicists have proposed multiple universes, or a multiverse, wherein infinite universes, a few of them with properties supporting life, could counterbalance the infinitesimal probability of the degree of fine-tuning necessary in a single universe if it occurred only by chance. The difference between these views has obvious and profound metaphysical and religious implications. Beginning about two-thirds through the book, Davies describes the possibilities afforded, in principle, by string theory/superstring theory/M-theory to bring about a multiverse. Unfortunately, that is the problem with the current state of string/M theory. It is a mathematical construct wherein ph...