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Carlos Hernandez
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Is God in the Details?
From cosmic coincidence to conservative cosmopolitics.
By Kenneth Silber
Victor J. Stenger has created new universes. Lots of them. In some, the stars shine for only a fraction of a second. In others, atoms are the size of tennis balls and a typical day lasts trillions of hours. Stenger achieves these wildly disparate results by altering a few of the underlying "constants" of nature--the mass of a proton, for example, or the strength of the electromagnetic force. He ends up with worlds that look radically different from our own.
Stenger is a theoretical physicist at the University of Hawaii and author of a book titled The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology. His "universes" are computer simulations, the output of a program that he wrote and has named--a bit provocatively--"Monkey God." Stenger does not plan out the universes that he creates; he has allowed particle masses and force strengths to vary randomly, many orders of magnitude different from the levels observed in nature. A lot of the resulting universes, says Stenger, "look pretty funny but still had long-lived stars."
Complete text at http://reason.com/9907/fe.ks.is.shtml
From cosmic coincidence to conservative cosmopolitics.
By Kenneth Silber
Victor J. Stenger has created new universes. Lots of them. In some, the stars shine for only a fraction of a second. In others, atoms are the size of tennis balls and a typical day lasts trillions of hours. Stenger achieves these wildly disparate results by altering a few of the underlying "constants" of nature--the mass of a proton, for example, or the strength of the electromagnetic force. He ends up with worlds that look radically different from our own.
Stenger is a theoretical physicist at the University of Hawaii and author of a book titled The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology. His "universes" are computer simulations, the output of a program that he wrote and has named--a bit provocatively--"Monkey God." Stenger does not plan out the universes that he creates; he has allowed particle masses and force strengths to vary randomly, many orders of magnitude different from the levels observed in nature. A lot of the resulting universes, says Stenger, "look pretty funny but still had long-lived stars."
Complete text at http://reason.com/9907/fe.ks.is.shtml
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