The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
208 pages
English language
Published April 3, 2001 by Basic Books.
Great book. I will definitely read it again sometime. Covers in depth the 6 constants that govern the way the universe is and what it would be like if they were different.
It's a little incomplete now since the book is from 2000 and 20 years can be an eternity in science, but overall it's still a good introduction to the main points of the universe via the constants (the six numbers in the title) that rule those principles.
Unfortunately I find this book very misleading, as it over-states how fine tuned the universe is and most people do not have the education to research that there could be arguments not in the book about this subject. You could easily alter any of the forces by an order of magnitude, especially if you did it /in combination/, say scaling up and down several of the forces at the same time. You could also entirely get rid of the weak force and get a universe incredibly similar to our own, except that it would have stars that operate using deuterium fusion via the strong force. Our own star in a weakless universe would be much smaller than our current star in order to support life, roughly 5% of our size, which goes to show you can actually vary the sizes of things and the forces A LOT and still get …
Unfortunately I find this book very misleading, as it over-states how fine tuned the universe is and most people do not have the education to research that there could be arguments not in the book about this subject. You could easily alter any of the forces by an order of magnitude, especially if you did it /in combination/, say scaling up and down several of the forces at the same time. You could also entirely get rid of the weak force and get a universe incredibly similar to our own, except that it would have stars that operate using deuterium fusion via the strong force. Our own star in a weakless universe would be much smaller than our current star in order to support life, roughly 5% of our size, which goes to show you can actually vary the sizes of things and the forces A LOT and still get life to work!
See arxiv.org/pdf/1801.06081.pdf the original paper if weakless universes interest you.
