“The universe is a put-up job”

Hi everyone and welcome to April’s blog.

I promised some examples of ‘fine-tuning’ and with Spring and new life bursting out all over the place, carbon seemed a great place to start…

All life on earth (and likely all life anywhere) is based on the element carbon. Of all the atoms (all the elements) in the universe, it’s the only one with the right sort of characteristics… It can all get a bit technical at this point, but suffice to say that whereas many types of atom like to pair up or combine with a few others, carbon is a positive ‘party animal’!!..

Some of its multi-atom units (known in the trade as ‘molecules’) are enormous… chains or rings of hundreds of carbon atoms combined with a few other useful elements thrown in. You may have heard of some of these mega-molecules – proteins, enzymes, DNA; the very building blocks of life. No other element can do this.

The trouble is, carbon itself is very hard to make – almost impossible in fact; at least it should be! Like every element except hydrogen, carbon is made inside stars by the process of nuclear fusion. The smaller bits you need to fuse together to make it are three helium nuclei which must all collide pretty much simultaneously. When the physicists started trying to calculate how often this would happen, they just couldn’t account for enough carbon. They could see carbon all over the universe, BUT they couldn’t work out how it all got there.

In the end, a brilliant British scientist called Fred Hoyle figured out that there must be a special energy state (a ‘resonance’) that allows it to happen: something no one had seen or measured, but he realised it must be there. He even calculated the value of it and asked his research colleagues to look for it in the laboratory. After a lot of work, their experiments were able to show he was right.

It was an outstanding intellectual achievement, but it upset many physicists at the time… why ever should the forces that govern the atomic nucleus allow this extraordinary special energy state without which the evolution of carbon-based life would be impossible?

Fred’s response was typically pithy... A lifelong atheist, he nevertheless declared the universe to be ‘a put-up job’. He later wrote: ‘A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.'