#coincidence

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics". To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile. Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life. ↗

— Paul Davies

#chance #coincidence #fine-tuning #fred-hoyle #id

Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#coincidence #random

In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury. ↗

— Harlan Coben

#fury #happen #life #novels #real

It is no coincidence that our country has not been attacked since 9-11. Our initiatives to protect the homeland and aggressively take the fight to the terrorists have been factors in that success. ↗

— Roger Wicker

#attacked #been #coincidence #country #factors

Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist. ↗

— Walther Bothe

#coincidence #essential #exaggeration #field #found

Rossi was the first to describe another system working with valves in parallel; it has the advantage that it can easily be extended to coincidences between more than two events, and is therefore predominantly used today. ↗

— Walther Bothe

#another #between #coincidences #describe #easily

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction. ↗

— Carl Clinton Van Doren

#american #born #cabin #coincidence #cooper

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#almost #being #books #case #coincidence

Maruman does not loll. ↗

— Isobelle Carmody

#accidental #cat #coincidence #funny #humor

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic. ↗

— Isabel Allende

#around #aware #coincidences #dreams #emotions