Ruminations on multiverses; Another wild view (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, September 03, 2016, 22:38 (3002 days ago) @ David Turell

Conjuring up alternative fine tuning results in a universe that can make carbon easily. Therefore it can possibly exist! The games folks play to sell the multiverse and get rid of our fine tuning:-https://www.newscientist.com/article/2104223-stars-burning-strangely-make-life-in-the-multiverse-more-likely/-Your existence depends on an improbable threesome. A delicate reaction within stars called the triple-alpha process, which creates carbon, ... Now, two researchers argue that stars in other universes might have alternative ways of producing carbon, giving life as we know it a greater chance in multiple universes.-The triple-alpha process gets its name from the three helium nuclei involved, which are also known as alpha particles. When the universe formed, it mostly consisted of hydrogen and helium, the simplest elements in the periodic table. Heavier elements were forged by the first stars, which fused the lighter nuclei together.-There's just one problem with this tidy model. Fuse two alpha particles together and you end up with a nucleus of four protons and four neutrons - namely beryllium-8, an isotope of the fourth element in the periodic table. But beryllium-8 is highly unstable and falls apart into two alpha particles within a fraction of a second. That means there isn't much of it in our universe.-“The natural stepping stone towards bigger elements is not present,” says Fred Adams of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.-That's no way to build a cosmos - yet puzzlingly, here we are. In the 1950s, astronomer Fred Hoyle figured out a solution. He argued that the abundance of carbon in the universe must be the result of a coincidence between the energy levels of alpha particles and carbon-12.-Hoyle said that because the energy of three alpha particles creates carbon-12 with more energy than it needs, this extra energy must be equal to an excited state of carbon-12, allowing it to decay to its ground state and remain stable. This so-called “resonance” between the energy values makes it possible to form carbon by fusing three alpha particles together.-Experiments later proved him right, but the resonance introduced its own problems. It occurs at a very particular value, 7.644 megaelectronvolts (MeV), and calculations show that the triple-alpha reaction is very sensitive to this value. Vary it by 0.1 MeV and the reaction will slow, producing less carbon, and a change of more than 0.3 MeV will halt carbon production altogether.-Hoyle and others argued that this means our universe must have been fine-tuned for life. That resonance could have occurred at a range of energies, and the fact that it just happened to occur at the point we needed it to for our existence makes us astonishingly lucky.-The odds of this happening at random are very low, and some argue that the only way to explain it is if our universe is just one of many in a multiverse. In that case, each universe could have slightly different values for the fundamental constants of physics. Life would arise only in suitable universes, meaning we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in one of these. (my bold)-But now Adams and his colleague Evan Grohs have argued that if other universes have different fundamental constants anyway, it's possible to create a universe in which beryllium-8 is stable, thus making it easy to form carbon and the heavier elements.-For this to happen would require a change in the binding energy of beryllium-8 of less than 0.1 MeV - something that the pair's calculations show should be possible by slightly altering the strength of the strong force, which is responsible for holding nuclei together.-Simulating how stars might burn in such a universe, they found that the stable beryllium-8 would produce an abundance of carbon, meaning life as we know it could potentially arise. “There are many more working universes than most people realise,” says Adams.-These universes would arguably be more logical, he says, with stars steadily building elements along the periodic table without having to resort to the triple-alpha process. “We tend to think not only is our universe fine-tuned for us, we also think this is the best universe one could design,” says Adams. “In some sense, we've designed a better universe.” ( my bold)
“It's an interesting point, that there is another way of treating the physics that is no bigger than the tweaking you need to get rid of the carbon resonance,” says Martin Rees of the University of Cambridge.-But Rees points out that we don't really know if the multiverse exists, let alone if different universes would have different physics. “We need a measure of the relative probability of all those things to decide whether we should be surprised that we're in the universe we are in,” he says. ( my bold)-Comment: I love these flights of fancy. The bold areas show the thought pattern of the research folks and Rees' answer. We have life on the universe we live in. They have the temerity to assume our universe has a poor design compared to theirs. Ours works. They don't know if the small change in strong force they propose doesn't affect anything else. Since it holds together nuclei in atoms it may well do odd things elsewhere. Yipes!