Free Republic

“The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.”- Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistryI. Prigogine, N. Gregair, A. Babbyabtz, Physics Today 25, pp. 23-28“The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly. You see,” Davies adds, “even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the...

The Universe is electrically neutral, with one electron to cancel out the charge of every proton in the Universe, and the nuclear forces are extremely short-range, failing to extend beyond the scale of an atomic nucleus. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, only gravitation matters. The Universe expands at the rate it does throughout its history — and not at a different one — for two reasons alone: our laws of gravity and all the forms of energy that exist in the Universe. If things were slightly different from how they actually are, we wouldn't exist. Here's...