Why Does the World Exist?: One Man's Quest for the Big Answer

by Jim Holt

“Notice,” Leslie said, “that for life to evolve in the universe, each of the cosmic constants needs to be fine-tuned in a particular way for many different reasons at once. The strength of the electromagnetic force, for example, has to be in a particular narrow range, first, so matter would be distinguished from radiation and you have something to make living beings out of; second, so that all quarks wouldn’t turn into leptons, meaning there never would have been any atoms; third, so that protons wouldn’t decay so quickly that there’d soon be no atoms remaining, let alone organisms to survive the radiation produced by the decay; fourth, for protons not to repel one another so strongly that there’d be no such thing as chemistry, and hence no chemically-based beings like us.”