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Seventy years ago, Italian-American nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi asked his colleagues a question during a lunchtime conversation. If life is common in our Universe, why can’t we see any evidence of its activity out there (aka. “where is everybody?”) Seventy years later, this question has launched just as many proposed resolutions as to how extraterrestrial intelligence (ETIs) could be common, yet go unnoticed by our instruments. Some possibilities that have been considered are that humanity might be alone in the Universe, early to the party, or is not in a position to notice any yet. But in a recent study,...

As humans, we know we are conscious because we experience and feel things. Yet scientists and great thinkers are unable to explain what consciousness is and they are equally baffled about where it comes from."Consciousness — or better, conscious experience — is obviously a part of reality," said Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician and theoretical physicist at the Munich Center For Mathematical Philosophy, Germany. "We're all having it but without understanding how it relates to the known physics, our understanding of the universe is incomplete."With that in mind, Kleiner is hoping math will enable him to precisely define consciousness. Working with...

Is belief in God rational? Can it be proved beyond reasonable doubt? The Bible seems to say yes. 'What can be known about God is plain to people,' writes St Paul in Romans 1.19-20, 'because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse.'In this the ancient philosophers agreed, with both Plato and Aristotle holding that the existence of a transcendent God is a matter of solid logical reasoning.Modern thinkers since...

Leonard Susskind interview - If the deep laws of the universe had been ever so slightly different, human beings wouldn't, and couldn't, exist. All explanations of this exquisite fine-tuning, obvious and not-so-obvious, have problems or complexities.

A new estimate suggests the Milky Way is home to six billion Earth-like planets. So far, we’ve found just one potential candidate. In 2009, the Kepler space telescope constantly watched over some 200,000 stars in our corner of the Milky Way. It was looking for where life might exist—by pinpointing small, rocky planets in the temperate zones of warm, yellow suns, and figuring out just how special Earth is in the grand scheme of things. While the mission revolutionized the study of exoplanets, those main objectives went largely unfulfilled. A mechanical failure cut short Kepler’s initial survey in 2013. Astronomers...

John Horton Conway, a legendary mathematician who stood out for his love of games and for bringing mathematics to the masses, died on Saturday, April 11, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from complications related to COVID-19. He was 82. Known for his unbounded curiosity and enthusiasm for subjects far beyond mathematics, Conway was a beloved figure in the hallways of PrincetonÂ’s mathematics building and at the Small World coffee shop on Nassau Street, where he engaged with students, faculty and mathematical hobbyists with equal interest. Conway, who joined the faculty in 1987, was the John von Neumann Professor in Applied...

More than a decade has passed since we joined forces to try and find out if there was any reality to a claim that highly accurate units of length had been in used during the British Neolithic. We found that these supposedly primitive people were using a highly developed science that connected them to the rhythms of the Earth.But our biggest personal challenge has been to face up to the consequences of our own findings because they have brought us to the point where we have found compelling evidence that our planet and its environment has been carefully designed for...

Are the Laws of the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life? By Korey Haynes | November 12, 2018 Humans have often looked at the night sky and wondered if there’s anyone else out there. But stare into that darkness long enough, and many wonder instead: how did we get here? What were the odds, in a universe so enormous and chaotic, that humans should have come to exist at all? Is life, let alone intelligent life, such a wildly improbable occurrence that we’re the only ones here? Or are we an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics?Life exists on Earth (assuming...

t’s something people tell me all the time, and usually in hushed tones: “With a trillion planets out there, we really can’t be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.” In other words, given the enormous amount of real estate in space, aliens are sure to exist. So why haven’t we found any? I don’t dispute this straightforward idea because, after all, it underpins the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). But not everyone agrees. A recent paper by three researchers at the University of Oxford is throwing shade on those who feel confident that the cosmos is thick with extraterrestrials....

For almost a century, physicists have wondered whether the most counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics (QM) could actually be true. Only in recent years has the technology necessary for answering this question become accessible, enabling a string of experimental results—including startling ones reported in 2007 and 2010, and culminating now with a remarkable test reported in May—that show that key predictions of QM are indeed correct. Taken together, these experiments indicate that the everyday world we perceive does not exist until observed, which in turn suggests—as we shall argue in this essay—a primary role for mind in nature. It is...

Full Title:New Evidence For Anthropic Theory That Fundamental Physics Constants Underlie Life-Enabling Universe For nearly half a century, theoretical physicists have made a series of discoveries that certain constants in fundamental physics seem extraordinarily fine-tuned to allow for the emergence of a life-enabling universe. Constants that crisscross the Standard Model of Particle Physics guided the formation of hydrogen nuclei during the Big Bang, along with the carbon and oxygen atoms initially fused at the center of massive first-generation stars that exploded as supernovae; these processes in turn set the stage for solar systems and planets capable of supporting carbon-based life...

The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no...

Cosmos Finale Takes One Last Shot at the "Delusion that We Have Some Privileged Position in the Universe" As David noted yesterday, the final episode of Cosmos aired Sunday night. It was a fitting end, in keeping with what we've seen already in the series. Much of it covered uncontroversial science, such as how cosmic rays were discovered, or why cosmology developed concepts like dark matter (to help explain why stars orbit so quickly at the edge of their galaxies) and dark energy (to help explain why the universe continues to expand despite all the matter it contains). Neil deGrasse...

Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all. For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley's argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe "out there" into which we have each individually arrived....

The subject of the debate was the Anthropic Principle, which states that the observable universe has to be as it is in order to support life. That is, the fundamental constants of the universe are precisely chosen such that if they were tweaked only slightly, then life, the earth or even our galaxy would not have formed. Thus, these values are as we observe them only because we are here to observe them in the first place. Paul Davies, director of Beyond: The Institute for Fundamental Concepts in Physics at Arizona State University, was the first to speak, arguing that...

NEWS ADVISORY, June 20 /Christian Newswire/-- Britain’s renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told a recent Hong Kong news conference the human race must “spread out into space for the survival of the species.“ He cited “sudden global warming, nuclear war, or a genetically engineered virus” as threats that could wipe out humanity at any time. “As dire as Hawking’s concerns may be, humanity’s plight is actually worse,” says astronomer Hugh Ross, founder and president of the science/faith think tank Reasons To Believe (www.reasons.org). “But,” he adds, “that is not to say the human race is without hope.”  Ross explains, “It’s important to...

Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees talks about the conditions for life. How unique is our world? Is the universe itself just the byproduct of many failed, sterile or stillborn universes that might have preceded it? Helen Matsos: I was recently at a gathering of scientists, including notables such as Mitchell Feigenbaum, Oliver Sacks, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and discovered you are much admired among this group. For instance, Neil referred to you as one of the last great gentleman astronomers of our time. Martin Rees: (laughs) Does he mean it as compliment or not? Mastos: Maybe he was referring to...

Cosmic Conundrum The universe seems uncannily well suited to the existence of life. Could that really be an accident?[snip]

We are lucky to be alive. Extraordinarily lucky. So lucky, in fact, that some people can only see God's hand in our good fortune. Creationists are fond of pointing out that if you mess with the physical laws of the Universe just a little, we wouldn't be here. For example, if the neutron were just 1% heavier, or the proton 1% lighter, or the electron were to have 20% more electrical charge, then atoms could not exist. There would be no stars, and no life. But although creationists rejoice in the divine providence that has made the Universe exquisitely contrived...