Humanity has long wondered how the stars, galaxies, and life itself began? For stars to create atoms needs stable galaxies, that would fly apart without the dark matter that just happens to prevent that. Stars create energy by nuclear fusion based on neutrons that the weak force just happens to allow, and they only made the carbon atoms that life needs thanks to a just right energy resonance:
“The energy at which the carbon resonance occurs is determined by the interplay between the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. If the strong force were slightly stronger or slightly weaker … the universe might very well be devoid of life and go unobserved.” (Davies, 2006).
The Goldilocks effect is that our universe has an unreasonable number of factors set just right for life, without which we wouldn’t exist. For example:
“Take, for instance, the neutron. It is 1.00137841870 times heavier than the proton, which is what allows it to decay into a proton, electron and neutrino—a process that determined the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium after the big bang and gave us a universe dominated by hydrogen. If the neutron-to-proton mass ratio were even slightly different, we would be living in a very different universe: one, perhaps, with far too much helium, in which stars would have burned out too quickly for life to evolve, or one in which protons decayed into neutrons rather than the other way around, leaving the universe without atoms. So, in fact, we wouldn’t be living here at all—we wouldn’t exist.” (Ananthaswamy, 2012).
Were these values set just so by a kind creator, or did a vast system spawn many universes and we just happen to be on the life-supporting one? The Goldilocks effect isn’t that our universe is designed for life as if so, it is a poor design, as most of the universe is inhospitable to life. It is that our universe is balanced on a knife edge, between the lushness of life and barren desolation:
“The great mystery is not why there is dark energy. The great mystery is why there is so little of it [10−122]… The fact that we are just on the knife edge of existence, [that] if dark energy were very much bigger we wouldn’t be here, that’s the mystery.” (Susskind, 2007).
The list of cosmic coincidences that allow life is long (Barnes, 2012), including:
1. Strong force. If the strong force was stronger or weaker by just 1% there would be no carbon or heavier elements anywhere in the universe.
2. Weak force. If the weak force was any weaker the hydrogen in the universe would be greatly decreased, starving stars of nuclear fuel and leaving the universe a cold and lifeless place.
3. Neutrons. If neutrons were slightly less massive the universe would be entirely protons, and if lower by 1%, then all protons would decay into neutrons so no atoms other than hydrogen, helium, lithium, and beryllium could form.
4. Cosmic microwave background. This radiation has a slight anisotropy, roughly one part in 100,000, just enough to allow stars and galaxies to form. Any smaller and the early universe would have been too smooth for stars and galaxies to form, and any larger and stable stars with planetary systems would be extremely rare.
5. Cosmological constant. The positive and negative contributions to the vacuum energy density cancel to 120-digit accuracy, but the 121st digit makes our universe possible.
What then explains the good fortune that lets us exist? We can’t call it a lucky accident from a sample of one, unless there are many universes, so multiverse theory is popular because it lets our universe be an accident. Yet while the Goldilocks effect is based on evidence, the multiverse is based on no evidence at all:
“The multiverse has only ever existed, so far as we know, in the mind of man. Its most promising research programs, string theory and early rapid cosmic inflation theory, have bounced along on enthusiasm alone, prompting ever more arcane speculations for which there may never be any possibility of evidence.” (O’Leary, 2017).
For example, Smolin’s speculation that black holes spawn universes predicts nothing, nor does it suggest why a mathematical infinity might create a universe.
However if our universe came from a primal network, properties like its refresh rate, connectivity, topology, and bandwidth could explain the speed of light, Planck’s constant, the cosmological constant, and the electron’s mass and charge, respectively. In this view, our universe has the properties it does based on its quantum origin, so if other universes began as bubbles in the quantum bulk, as ours did, they would have the same laws of physics. Our universe is then as it is not by accident or design but by inheritance, just as a seed inherits from its progenitor.
Was our universe made for us, like a table laid before a guest? Like Goldilocks, we sit before a meal that is just right, but why? Crocodiles live in rivers that seem finely-tuned for them, but to call that design is to reverse causality, as rivers existed before crocodiles came along. Crocodiles just evolved to live in them, so they are fine-tuned to rivers, not the other way around. Likewise, our universe came before us, so it didn’t adjust to us any more than rivers adjusted to crocodiles. The Goldilocks effect is like the cutlery on a table wondering why it fits the food it was laid out for. Our universe produced us to live in it because it could, but the chance of doing that was astronomically low. So low that only a grand evolution could achieve it, and even then, it took billions of years.