Our Universe seems perfect. If it wasn't, life as we know it wouldn't exist.
Three physicists from the US, France, and Korea have come up with a new explanation for why life, the Universe, and everything in it has had such a prime opportunity to exist.
There's been a lot of opportunity for interesting things to unfold over the past 13 billion years because the amount of energy and mass is so neatly balanced.
The expansion of spacetime would have been better if there had been a few magnitudes.
Fine-tuning is a process in physics where the features of a system match or cancel out with such precision. The system wouldn't look the way it does if it didn't.
Our Universe is neutrally charged. Adding a few more electrons would cause clumps of matter to push itself apart, because there is a near-identical number of protons to cancel out each electron's charge.
It could be a consequence of what's referred to as 'naturalness'. Hard laws of astronomy don't make the Moon's near-perfect alignment of the Sun during a solar eclipse. The size of the Moon, the Sun, and our perspective don't need any more explanations.
Physicists don't like appealing to vague coincidences when observing the Universe. There's a strong desire to dig through the rulebook for a deeper explanation if two features of a system seem similar.
The solution for electrons and protons could be explained.
There's no shortage of clever and creative ideas to chew on in the case of the Universe's reflection of energy and expansion. Most fall into two categories.
The anthropic principle says that only a universe capable of generating thinking brains like ours can ask questions like 'Why am I here?'
This could mean there are other universes. Maybe an infinite number, most of the time collapsing when they're born or exploding in boredom. Ours is one of the good ones. It isn't a proposition that could bear scientific fruit without a way of establishing the existence of multiverses.
There is a chance that we're missing a crucial piece of the physics puzzle, such as new fields or symmetries that could fail under certain conditions.
The light resting mass of the particle that represents a field that gives many fundamental particles their mass might suggest there's a gap in our understanding of forces and particles.
It is the result of a strange-exact cancellation of other physics.
This latest suggestion combines the idea of unknown physics behind the itty-bitty mass with a kind of quantum multiverse effect that could be tested.
The model puts the particle at the center of the explanation. The link between forces and mass is provided by the way the boson is coupled with other particles.
The authors show how weakly interacting variables in a field might affect different kinds of empty space, specifically patches of nothingness with varying degrees of expansion.
It's a multiverse in a way, because the Triggers occurring in different patches of infinite expanding space could theoretically give rise to a seemingly well balanced Universe like ours.
Their math shows that there is room for explanations of dark matter. Better still, it predicts the existence of multiple Higgs particles, all smaller than the one we've already observed. The hypothesis can be tested, at least.
One day, it could explain the eerily well-matched tug-of-war that has allowed a complex cosmos to unfold. A place that we love as our universe.
The research was published in a journal.
