Physics says you’re an impurity in an otherwise beautiful universe?

Physics says you’re an impurity in an otherwise beautiful universe.

The laws of physics seem to act equally in all directions. This is one of the great symmetries of nature. It gives rise to the inverse square law of gravity—the pull of gravity decreases proportionally to the square of the distance between two objects. Lights seem to drop off in brightness as the inverse square as well, which means that distant stars and galaxies naturally appear quite a bit dimmer than those nearby.

On the other hand, the farther away we look, the more galaxies we can conceivably encounter in our field of view. Add the two effects together, and the farther you look in any given direction, the more galaxies you see, even though each more distant one is individually dimmer. The cumulative brightness will appear greater and greater the farther you look. Taken to the logical extreme—the infinite recesses of space—in every direction you look you should eventually see a star, and the entire sky should appear as bright as the surface of the sun.

So why is the sky dark at night? That query isn’t quite as stupid as you might suppose. It’s called Olbers’ paradox, after Heinrich Olbers, who, in 1823, was one of the last people to discover it.

We live in a universe that seems to be made of matter. Every star, every galaxy, except for the odd cosmic ray or ephemeral particle in the atmosphere, it’s all matter all the time. In other words, if the perfect symmetry between matter and antimatter remained perfect, you wouldn’t be here to think about it.

Sometime very, very early on in the universe (roughly 10-35 seconds after the beginning, if you can wrap your mind around a number that small), there was a small break, and about a billion and one particles of matter were produced for every billion antiparticles. As for how that happened, we honestly can’t say, because nobody’s been able to reproduce it in a lab.

The discovery of the Higgs was huge, and the Higgs was celebrated, in no small part, because it purported to give rise to mass. But as with most discoveries, this is a bit overblown. Your atoms get most of their mass from the protons and neutrons inside. The protons and neutrons, in turn, are made up of even smaller, fundamental particles known as quarks, and yes, it’s true that the quarks get their mass from the Higgs. But if you add up the quarks in a proton, the sum is very much greater than the parts. The quarks amount to only about 2 percent of the mass of the proton, and the rest comes from the insane speeds and energies inside the proton itself. The Higgs, in other words, counts for very little when you step on the scale.

Electrons care a great deal more about the Higgs, since a world with a massless electron is far different from our own. Electrons are the yin to the proton’s yang. They allow for a flow of electricity, and by sharing electrons between atoms, allow for bonding, for chemistry itself.

Just as a spaceship will escape the gravitational pull of the Earth, a massless electron (which, by definition, will travel at the speed of light) will easily break its molecular bonds.

Without electrons binding to protons, there would be no chemistry, no molecules, and nothing more complicated than a cloud of charged gas.

And you’re not a sentient cloud of gas, are you?

Reminded me of the Fine Tuning discussions on Closer to Truth

We human beings sit roughly midway between the sizes of atoms and galaxies, and both must be so perfectly structured for us to exist. It's called 'fine-tuning' and it's all so breathtakingly precise that it cries out for explanation. To some, fine-tuning leads to God. To others, there are non-supernatural explanations. Both are startling.