In a recent issue of Nature, there was a thrilling article by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek on a new way of calculating the slightly different masses of neutrons and protons. The new calculation confirms that neutrons are very slightly heavier than protons, the ratio of their masses being 939.56563 to 938.27231—a trivial difference, one might think, but if it were otherwise the universe as we know it could never have developed.
The whole of life is a balancing act.
