Quantum Physics Just Confirmed Something 'IMPOSSIBLE' About Why The Universe Exists

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]There is a number that has been measured by some of the most precise instruments ever built. It is approximately one.

[00:00:07]That number means nothing until you hear the other number. The value that the laws of physics predict it should be based on the two most rigorously tested theories in the history of science is approximately 10 to the power of 120. 10 followed by 120 zeros. The gap between what theory predicts and what reality contains is the largest discrepancy ever recorded in any field of science. And the only reason you exist to hear me describe it is because the measurement landed on one. If it had landed anywhere else, even slightly, the universe itself would not be here. Not the galaxies, not the stars, not the planet you are sitting on, not you. Let us begin.

[00:00:50]The number is called the cosmological constant.

[00:00:54]It is the value that determines more than any other single parameter in physics how fast empty space itself expands or contracts. It controls whether a universe holds together long enough for anything complex to form inside it. And the gap between what theory predicts the value should be and what we actually measure is the longest unresolved problem in modern theoretical physics.

[00:01:17]Steven Weineberg, the Nobel laurate who unified the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces, called it the worst theoretical prediction ever made. Other physicists have used stronger words.

[00:01:29]After half a century of effort by some of the best minds in the field, the gap remains exactly where it was when it was first noticed. To understand why this matters, consider what would happen if the value were different. If the cosmological constant were larger than the value we measure by even a small amount, the universe would have expanded so rapidly after the big bang that no galaxies could ever have formed. No stars, no planets, no atoms heavier than hydrogen and helium. The cosmos would be a thin, cold, everexpanding fog of primordial gas racing apart so quickly that nothing could ever clump together.

[00:02:09]If the cosmological constant was smaller by an equally small amount, the opposite would have happened. The universe would have recolapsed in on itself within seconds or minutes or at most a few hundred,000 years, crushed back to a singularity before the first atom ever formed. Either way, nothing complex, nothing structured, no observers.

[00:02:33]The value we measure is the only value across an enormous range of possibilities that allows everything we have ever seen, touched, photographed, or theorized about to exist at all. For most of the 20th century, this was not considered a problem. Physicists assumed the cosmological constant was simply zero. Einstein had introduced it into his equations of general relativity in 1917, then abandoned it a decade later when Edwin Hubble's observations revealed that the universe was expanding.

[00:03:06]Einstein famously called the cosmological constant his greatest blunder, a mathematical fudge factor he had added before observation proved it unnecessary.

[00:03:16]For 70 years, zero was the assumed value. Zero was simple. Zero required no explanation.

[00:03:24]Then in 1998, two independent teams of astronomers using observations of distant supernovi as standard candles to measure cosmic distances discovered something nobody expected. The expansion of the universe was not slowing down under gravity as everyone assumed. It was accelerating.

[00:03:44]Some unknown force was pushing space apart at an everinccreasing rate. The teams led by Saul Pelmutter, Adam Ree and Brian Schmidt would share the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for the discovery. And the simplest interpretation of what they had found was that the cosmological constant Einstein had abandoned was not zero after all. It had a tiny positive value.

[00:04:10]So tiny it had escaped detection for 70 years of careful astronomy.

[00:04:15]So tiny it was almost zero but not zero just enough to push the universe apart gently accelerating its expansion over billions of years.

[00:04:27]This is where the discrepancy enters the picture because quantum field theory the framework that describes how particles and forces behave at the smallest scales makes a specific prediction about what the cosmological constant should be. In quantum theory, empty space is not empty. It is filled with what physicists call virtual particles. Fluctuations of the underlying quantum fields, flickering into and out of existence on time scales too short to observe, but real enough to contribute to the energy density of the vacuum itself. The space inside the room you are sitting in, the gap between your hand and the surface beside it, the void between the Earth and the Moon, is not empty. It is sthing. It is alive with quantum activity. And every cubic cm of that activity, every tiny pulse of virtual particle creation and annihilation contributes to the energy density of the vacuum. When you calculate using the laws of quantum field theory, how much energy these vacuum fluctuations should produce, you get a number. That number plugged into Einstein's equations predicts what the cosmological constant should be. The predicted value is approximately 10 ^ of 120 times larger than the value Pearl Mutter, Ree and Schmidt actually measured. Either quantum field theory is producing an enormous number that is somehow almost perfectly canceled out by an opposing contribution we have not yet identified to a precision of 120 decimal places or our entire framework for understanding the vacuum is missing something fundamental.

[00:06:09]No one knows which.

[00:06:11]Before we go further, if you are kind enough, a gentle like and tap on subscribe would mean the world to me. It is a small gesture, but I hold it with deep gratitude because every bit of your support keeps this tiny universe alive.

[00:06:25]In 1987, a full decade before the supernova teams discovered that the constant was not zero, Steven Weinberg made this situation explicit. He pointed out that the cosmological constant could in principle take a vast range of possible values. Within that range, only a vanishingly small window permits structure, complexity, and observers.

[00:06:47]Inside that window, galaxies, stars, planets, life. Outside that window, nothing complex enough to ask the question. The window is so narrow against the range of possible values that the chance of a random universe falling inside it is comparable to throwing a dart blindly across the visible cosmos and hitting one specific atom on one specific grain of dust on one specific planet. And our universe is inside the window. by every measurement we have ever made. To every precision we have ever achieved. This is not philosophy. This is arithmetic. The number is real. The measurement is reproducible. The discrepancy between theory and observation is the largest such discrepancy ever recorded in the entirety of science. And the value we measure, however it got there, is the value that permits the universe to exist as a place where complexity can emerge.

[00:07:42]The fact that it landed where it landed is what we will spend the rest of this story trying to understand.

[00:07:48]Sit with what that gap actually means.

[00:07:51]We have a theory that predicts one number. We have a measurement that produces a different number smaller by a factor of 10 to the 120. And the only reason there is a universe here with you in it with stars and galaxies and chemistry and biology and the air filling your lungs as you breathe in and out is because the measurement landed where it did. If the predicted value had been right, the universe would have either expanded itself into nothing or collapsed back to a singularity before the first atom ever formed. The fact that we exist is the fact that physics somehow somewhere between the prediction and the measurement gave us a value that allows complexity to emerge. And here is what almost nobody outside theoretical physics has stopped to ask. Why? Why did the measurement land where it landed?

[00:08:42]Why does the universe sit precisely inside the narrow window that permits everything we have ever seen?

[00:08:48]The answer to that question, if you follow it to its logical conclusion, does not lead to a new piece of physics.

[00:08:55]It does not lead to the discovery of some deeper law that makes the value come out the way it did. It leads instead to three possible explanations, each of which is more uncomfortable than the last. The first is that the universe got lucky. The cosmological constant simply landed where it landed by chance against odds so extreme that the word coincidence stops being adequate.

[00:09:19]The second is that there are other universes. Many of them possibly infinitely many with different values of the constant in each one and in most of them nothing exists to observe anything.

[00:09:31]We are simply in one of the rare ones where the value permits observers. The third is that the value is what it is because something at some level we have not yet identified intended it to be.

[00:09:44]Three explanations. Chance, multiverse, design. We will examine each of them in the final chapter of this story. But before we get to those explanations, there is something else that needs to be said clearly. The precision required to fine-tune the cosmological constant is not the only fine-tuning the universe contains. There are at least two dozen other parameters in physics that require similar tuning. The mass of the electron, the strength of the strong nuclear force, the ratio between gravity and electromagnetism, the matter antimatter asymmetry that allowed any material to survive the first second of the big bang. The initial entropy of the universe which according to Roger Penrose was fine-tuned to a precision of one part in 10 raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 123. A number so vast it could not be written out using every subatomic particle in the cosmos as digits.

[00:10:42]Every one of these parameters in our universe has the right value. Every dial is turned to a position that permits something complex enough to look at the dial and notice that it is turned.

[00:10:56]In 1953, decades before any of this was understood as a pattern, a British astronomer at the University of Cambridge sat down to calculate one of those values. He was a committed atheist. He had spent his career arguing that the universe required no external explanation that it was a self-organizing system that produced its own structure through entirely natural processes. And then he ran the calculation and what he found shook him so deeply that he spent the rest of his career trying to explain what it meant.

[00:11:28]He used a phrase that has since become famous in the literature of cosmology.

[00:11:32]He called the universe a putup job, meaning in his idiom that something or someone had arranged it. What he saw and why even an atheist could not dismiss it is where this story turns.

[00:11:46]The British astronomer was Fred Hy. He was born in 1915 in a village in West Yorkshire, the son of a wool merchant.

[00:11:54]He won a scholarship to Cambridge and stayed there for most of his career. By the late 1940s, he had become one of the most influential astronomers in the English-speaking world. A man whose voice was heard on BBC radio explaining cosmology to the British public. A man who coined the phrase Big Bang, though he used it as an insult because he did not believe in it.

[00:12:17]Hy's own theory, which he developed with two colleagues at Cambridge, was called the steadystate model. In the steady state model, the universe had no beginning. It had always existed. New matter was created continuously, very slowly, to fill in the gaps left by cosmic expansion. There was no creation event. There was no need for one. The universe explained itself.

[00:12:42]Hy held this view and his broader atheistic worldview with conviction. He argued often combatively that any theory invoking a beginning or an outside cause was a failure of physics. an admission that physics had not yet found the deeper natural law that would explain whatever had been attributed to creation. He was not a man who could be accused of bias toward theological conclusions. If anything, the bias ran the other way. In 1953, Hy was working on a problem that had been frustrating astrophysicists for years. The problem was how heavy elements get made. Stars, everyone understood, burn hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion. That process powers the sun and most other stars in the universe. But the universe contains more than just hydrogen and helium. It contains carbon, oxygen, iron, calcium. Every element on the periodic table heavier than helium had to come from somewhere. And the only place hot enough and dense enough to forge those elements was inside the cores of stars.

[00:13:51]The first step in that chain after helium is the formation of carbon. And carbon was where the problem was. To make a carbon nucleus, you need three helium nuclei to come together and fuse in what physicists call the triple alpha process. The trouble is that the intermediate step where two helium nuclei first stick together to form burillium 8 is extremely unstable.

[00:14:18]Burillium 8 falls apart almost immediately in less than a tenth of a millionth of a billionth of a second.

[00:14:25]The window during which a third helium nucleus has to find the burillium 8 before it disintegrates is so short that the entire reaction should almost never happen.

[00:14:36]Stars should produce essentially no carbon at all. But stars do produce carbon in enormous quantities.

[00:14:44]Every living thing on Earth is made of it. So something in the physics had to be different from what the standard calculations predicted.

[00:14:52]Hy worked the problem backward. He started from the assumption that carbon exists in the universe in the quantities observed and asked what nuclear physics would have to look like to produce that result.

[00:15:04]The answer he arrived at was that carbon 12 must have a previously undiscovered excited energy state at approximately 7.65 million electron volts above its ground state. If that energy level existed, it would create a resonance, a quantum mechanical sweet spot at which the triple alpha process becomes enormously more probable than it would otherwise be. The energy of three helium nuclei coming together would line up almost exactly with the energy of the predicted excited state of carbon. The reaction would catch. Carbon would form.

[00:15:42]Stars would produce the element in the quantities we observe. The prediction was specific. The energy level was unknown. No experiment had detected it.

[00:15:53]H oily traveled to Caltech in 1953 and asked William Fowler, the nuclear physicist who ran the lab there, to look for it. Fowler was skeptical. Hy, he later recalled, was not a nuclear physicist. He was a theoretician making a prediction about nuclear structure based on stellar abundances, which was not how nuclear physics was normally done. But Fowler agreed to run the experiment. His team including Ward Whailing and others set up the apparatus and looked. They found exactly what Hy had predicted. A carbon 12 resonance at 7.65 million electron volts within 30,000 electron volts of where Hy had said it would be. The prediction was confirmed.

[00:16:41]Carbon could form in stars. The universe could contain heavy elements. The chemistry of life was possible.

[00:16:50]What shook H oil was not the success of the prediction. He had expected the prediction to succeed. What shook him was the precision of the resonance. The energy level was exactly where it needed to be, within a tolerance so narrow that a small shift in either direction would have made stellar carbon production catastrophically inefficient. If the resonance had been a few% higher, the reaction would not catch. If it had been a few% lower, carbon would burn through too quickly into oxygen, leaving no surplus behind. The window inside which carbon-based chemistry becomes possible was narrow, and the universe had landed exactly inside it. Hy began saying things in interviews and essays that he had never said before. In a 1981 article published in engineering and science, he wrote that a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyied with physics as well as with chemistry and biology and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. He referred to the universe as a putup job. He never returned to formal religious belief, but he could no longer hold the view that the constants of nature were what they were because they had to be. He had calculated one of them and what he had found was a coincidence so precise that he could not by his own admission reconcile it with random chance. The carbon resonance is not the only example. Once physicists started looking, the pattern appeared everywhere they checked. The strong nuclear force, the force that holds atomic nuclei together against the electromagnetic repulsion of protons, has a strength that permits both stars to burn slowly and chemistry to assemble heavier elements. A few% stronger and pure hydrogen would not exist. Every proton would have fused instantly in the early universe, leaving no fuel for stars. A few% weaker and no element heavier than hydrogen could form at all. The window is narrow. Our value sits inside it. The ratio between gravity and electromagnetism is another.

[00:18:56]Electromagnetism is roughly 10^ the 36th power times stronger than gravity. That enormous ratio is what permits stars like the sun to last for 10 billion years. If gravity were even slightly stronger relative to electromagnetism, stars would burn through their fuel hundreds of times faster, leaving no time for life to evolve on any planet around them. The British astronomer Martin Ree in his 2000 book just six numbers identified this ratio as one of six fundamental constants whose values if changed by amounts undetectable in everyday physics would render the universe uninhabitable.

[00:19:34]The matter antimatter asymmetry is yet another. According to the standard model of particle physics, the early universe should have produced equal quantities of matter and antimatter which should have annihilated each other completely, leaving a thin bath of radiation expanding into nothing. Instead, for every billion antimatter particles created, approximately 1 billion and1 matter particles were created. The antimatter annihilated with the matter.

[00:20:02]What remained was the tiny surplus.

[00:20:04]Every atom in every galaxy in every star and every planet and every living thing that exists today is the residue of that one part in a billion asymmetry.

[00:20:15]No one knows why the asymmetry exists.

[00:20:18]The standard model does not predict it.

[00:20:20]The universe is the leftover from a coincidence that physics cannot yet explain.

[00:20:26]By the 1970s, the accumulation of these coincidences had reached the point where the pattern could no longer be ignored.

[00:20:33]In 1973 at a conference held in KCO to mark the 500th birthday of Nicholas Capernacus, a Cambridge astrophysicist named Brandon Carter introduced a term to describe what physicists were observing. He called it the anthropic principle. The principle at its most basic said this, "We observe a universe that permits observers. The universe must therefore be of a kind that permits observers."

[00:21:00]Carter was not making a claim about design. He was making a claim about observation.

[00:21:06]Any universe whose parameters did not permit observers would not be observed because there would be no one inside it to observe. By the 1980s, the anthropic principle had broadened into something larger. In 1986, John Barrow and Frank Tipler published the anthropic cosmological principle, a nearly 700page volume cataloging every known coincidence in physics, chemistry, biology, and cosmology that pointed toward fine-tuning.

[00:21:35]The list was extensive. Their conclusion was not that the universe was designed.

[00:21:40]Their conclusion was that the question of why the universe permits observers had become impossible to dismiss as trivial and impossible to answer with the standard tools of physics. Something deeper, they argued, was going on. They did not know what it was.

[00:21:58]For 70 years after Hy, the conversation about finetuning stayed at the cosmic scale. Stars, galaxies, the chemistry that permits life to exist somewhere in the universe. The arguments were abstract. The implications felt academic. Then on the 8th of May 2026, a team of physicists at Queen Mary University of London published a paper in Nature Communications that changed the scale of the conversation entirely.

[00:22:25]The team led by Professor Costa Traenko had been studying how liquids flow under different physical conditions. Their question was apparently narrow. They wanted to understand how the fundamental constants of physics determine the viscosity of liquids. Viscosity is the property that makes some liquids flow easily like water and others flow slowly like honey. It is determined at the deepest level by quantum mechanical interactions between the particles that make up the liquid. Those interactions depend in turn on the values of fundamental physical constants such as the plank constant and the charge of the electron. Trochenko and his colleagues calculated for the first time how viscosity would change if those fundamental constants were even slightly different from their measured values.

[00:23:12]What they found was that the values of the constants in our universe sit inside an extraordinarily narrow window that permits liquids to flow at the rates required by living cells. A few% change in the plank constant or the electron charge in either direction would render blood either too thick to circulate through capillaries or too thin to maintain the pressures required for organ function. The same constants that determine whether stars can form also determine whether the blood in your veins can move.

[00:23:43]The finetuning that physicists had been describing for half a century, the tuning that permits galaxies and stars and chemistry to exist, extends all the way down to the cellular level, to the flow of liquids inside organisms, to the circulation of your blood right now as you breathe in and out. Tchenko stated the implication plainly in the paper.

[00:24:06]Any change in fundamental constants, including an increase or decrease, would be equally bad news for flow and for liquid-based life. The window, he wrote, is quite narrow. The viscosity of human blood would become too thick or too thin for body function with only a few% change of some fundamental constants such as the plank constant or electron charge.

[00:24:29]This is what fine-tuning means in 2026.

[00:24:33]Not an abstract argument about the conditions for stars to form. Not a philosophical claim about distant galaxies. A specific, measurable, peer-reviewed finding that the laws of physics are tuned to permit blood to flow through the bodies of organisms that exist on a planet orbiting a star that itself exists only because the same laws are tuned to permit stars.

[00:24:57]every level from the largest cosmic scale to the smallest cellular one.

[00:25:02]Every dial is turned. The pattern that Hy saw in 1953 has not just held, it has deepened. It has gone all the way down.

[00:25:12]The universe is tuned. From the rate at which empty space expands to the strength of the forces that hold atoms together to the asymmetry that allowed matter to survive the first second of time to the resonance inside carbon nuclei that lets stars manufacture the element of life to the viscosity of the liquid moving through your veins right now. The question is why? Three explanations remain each of them more uncomfortable than the last. And by the end of this story, you will have to decide which of them you find least disturbing because none of them are comfortable and all of them are real.

[00:25:50]Three explanations, three attempts to make sense of a universe whose parameters appear to be fine-tuned to extreme precision for the existence of complexity, structure, and conscious observers.

[00:26:03]Each attempt has been proposed seriously by working scientists. Each one has been published in peer-reviewed journals.

[00:26:10]Each one has been defended by Nobel laureates and dismissed by other Nobel laureates. And each one carries with it implications that when fully considered are difficult to live with. We are going to look at all three of them in the order they are typically presented in the literature and then we are going to face a question that physics cannot answer because by the time we finish examining the three options, you will see that none of them dissolves the mystery. They redistribute it. They move it to a different location. But the mystery itself remains.

[00:26:42]The first explanation is chance. The cosmological constant landed where it landed because the fundamental constants of nature simply have the values they have with no deeper explanation required. And we are lucky to be in a universe where those values happen to permit observers.

[00:26:59]This explanation has the virtue of demanding nothing exotic. It does not require other universes. It does not require design. It treats the values of the constants as brute facts of nature.

[00:27:10]The way some philosophers treat the existence of the universe itself. Things just are what they are. The question of why they have these particular values is on this view a nonquest.

[00:27:23]Asking why the cosmological constant is what it is is like asking why the number two is even. It just is. The difficulty with chance is the arithmetic. We have a number. the cosmological constant fine-tuned to one part in 10^ the 120.

[00:27:40]We have at least two dozen other parameters fine-tuned within their own windows. The probability of all of them landing inside their life permitting windows simultaneously if the values were assigned independently and at random is the product of all those individual probabilities.

[00:27:56]The number you get when you multiply those probabilities together is small enough that it has no meaningful physical interpretation.

[00:28:03]It is smaller than the probability of any specific random event that has ever occurred or could ever occur in the entire history of the cosmos.

[00:28:13]The British astronomer Fred Hy who began his career as a committed atheist and who tried longer than almost anyone to hold to a purely naturalistic view of cosmic structure concluded in the end that the chance interpretation strained credul beyond what he was willing to accept. The numbers, he wrote, are so overwhelming as to put the conclusion almost beyond question. He was not the only one. The American physicist Paul Davis, who has spent his career working on these problems and who has not embraced any religious framework, has written that the appearance of design in physics is at minimum a puzzle that demands an answer. The arithmetic does not go away when you call it chance. It simply moves to a different part of the argument.

[00:28:58]The second explanation is the multiverse. If only one universe exists, the values of its constants require explanation. But if many universes exist, each with different values of the constants, then no explanation is required. Most of those universes would be sterile. Most would expand too fast or collapse too quickly or be made of incompatible chemistry. In the vast majority, nothing complex enough to observe anything would ever form. We are simply in one of the rare ones that permits observers because in all the others there is no one to ask the question. This solution dissolves the fine-tuning problem by sheer abundance.

[00:29:38]With enough universes, anything that is physically possible will exist somewhere. The fact that we observe a universe permitting our existence is not coincidence but selection.

[00:29:50]We could not by definition observe a universe that did not permit us.

[00:29:55]There are at least five major versions of the multiverse hypothesis in modern theoretical physics. The string theory landscape proposes that the equations of string theory have approximately 10 to the 500th power solutions. Each one corresponding to a possible universe with different physical constants.

[00:30:15]Inflationary cosmology, the leading framework for explaining what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, predicts that the same inflationary process that created our universe, should have created an infinite number of others in regions of space we cannot access. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which Hugh Everett proposed in 1957 and which is now considered a serious option by a significant fraction of working physicists holds that every quantum event splits reality into multiple branches each containing different outcomes.

[00:30:50]The mathematical universe hypothesis proposed by Max Tegmark suggests that every mathematically consistent structure exists as a physical universe somewhere. And cyclic cosmology proposes that universes are born and die in endless succession, each with potentially different parameters.

[00:31:10]The cost of the multiverse explanation is conceptual. It solves fine-tuning by multiplying the amount of reality that must exist by an inconceivable factor.

[00:31:20]Trillions of trillions of trillions of universes, almost all of them empty or hostile to life. All of them required to exist in order to make the existence of our universe statistically unremarkable.

[00:31:34]Some physicists, including the cosmologist George Ellis, have argued that this is not a scientific solution, but a kind of explanatory inflation.

[00:31:43]replacing one mystery with another that is even larger and crucially untestable.

[00:31:49]We cannot observe other universes. We cannot run experiments on them. We cannot confirm or deny their existence by any direct measurement. The multiverse on this objection may be the most expensive answer to any question ever proposed.

[00:32:06]The third explanation is design. That the values of the constants are what they are because something at some level of reality we have not yet identified intended them to be. This is the explanation that most scientists are most reluctant to articulate in public because it sounds like the abandonment of physics rather than its continuation.

[00:32:28]But it is also the explanation that the most rigorous calculation of cosmic fine-tuning seems at first reading to point toward. Hy himself after spending his career arguing against any such conclusion ended up using the phrase put up job to describe what he had found. He did not return to formal religion, but he could not after the carbon resonance calculation hold to a view of the universe as purely accidental.

[00:32:56]Other physicists have arrived at similar positions through similar reasoning. The American astronomer Owen Gingerich, the British cosmologist John Pulkinghorn, the physicist Freeman Dyson all reached the conclusion that the universe gives the appearance of having been intended for the existence of observers and all stopped short of claiming that science could prove it. The difficulty with design is that it appears to place the explanation outside the reach of physics. If a designing intelligence is responsible for the values of the constants, then the constants are no longer purely physical facts. They are intentional choices. And intentional choices are not the kind of thing physics as a discipline knows how to investigate.

[00:33:40]The design hypothesis answers the question of why the constants have the values they have. It does not provide a mechanism. It does not predict new observations. It does not in any standard scientific sense generate testable claims. For these reasons, most working physicists do not consider it a scientific hypothesis at all. They consider it a placeholder for our ignorance, a way of saying that we do not know how to explain something. So, we attribute the explanation to an agent whose properties are themselves unexplained.

[00:34:14]The design explanation on this view does not solve the problem. It reabels it. So we are left with three explanations, none of which is fully comfortable.

[00:34:25]Chance leaves us with arithmetic that does not believably support the conclusion.

[00:34:30]Multiverse leaves us with the multiplication of reality to an inconceivable degree to make our existence statistically ordinary.

[00:34:39]Design leaves us with an explanation that is not in the strictest sense scientific.

[00:34:45]And what becomes visible when you hold all three options together is that the mystery of fine-tuning is not the kind of problem that physics is currently equipped to solve. It is a problem that depending on which explanation you accept either makes physics deeper, makes physics larger, or moves us into a domain where physics does not apply. The honest position, the position that most thoughtful physicists privately occupy, is that we do not know. We do not know which of the three explanations is correct. We do not know whether some fourth explanation not yet conceived will eventually emerge. We do not know whether the question itself is wellformed or whether it is a misunderstanding that will look as strange to future generations as the question of what holds the earth up looks to us now. What we do know is that the universe we inhabit appears to be tuned. that the tuning extends from the rate at which empty space expands through the strength of the forces that hold atoms together through the chemistry that permits carbon to exist through the asymmetry that allowed any matter to survive the first second of the big bang all the way down to the viscosity of the liquid moving through the bodies of the organisms that ask the question every level every dial turned to a value that permits something complex enough to notice that it is turned Fred Hy died in 2001 at the age of 86. He spent the final decades of his career arguing sometimes against the prevailing consensus that the standard story of cosmic origins was incomplete.

[00:36:19]He was wrong about several things. He never accepted the big bang model even after the evidence for it became overwhelming. He proposed mechanisms for the origin of life that have not held up under scrutiny. But he was right about one thing and he was right earlier than almost anyone. He saw that the universe contains coincidences that do not behave like coincidences.

[00:36:42]He saw that the precision required to permit the existence of complexity is greater than any reasonable definition of luck can absorb. And he saw half a century before the experimental physicists at Queen Mary University demonstrated that fine-tuning extends all the way down to the flow of blood inside living bodies. That something about the structure of the cosmos appeared to be set up in advance. We do not know what set it up. We do not know whether anything did. We have three explanations, none of them comfortable.

[00:37:14]We have a measurement, the cosmological constant, that has been fine-tuned to a precision of one part in 10 to the 120.

[00:37:23]We have a universe that exists because that measurement landed where it did.

[00:37:28]And we have sitting inside that universe organisms whose blood circulates through them because the same constants that permit galaxies to form also permit the right viscosity for liquids in cells.

[00:37:40]The universe is here. You are here. And the laws that allowed for both sit precisely inside the narrow window that allowed for both. If that is chance, it is the most astonishing chance that has ever occurred. If it is multiverse, then we are one of an inconceivable number of versions of reality, almost all of them empty. If it is design, then something somewhere at a level of existence we have not yet learned to investigate, arranged for you to be reading these words. Which of those is true, we may never know. But the dials are turned and someone or something or some structure of reality we do not yet understand turned