The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five frames per second. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of 'actual moments' in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. “Until now, I've been writing about 'now' as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.” No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.Įxample: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on.

Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if 'a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics'. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal.

For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient 'coincidences' and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves.

“Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix.

About Time by Paul C.W. Davies