Why is the Cosmos Fit For Life?
Physicists, Biologists and Theologians Consider Humanity’s Oldest Question By Stephen Henderson Over the past few decades, physicists have devised startling theories about the universe’s formation and its subsequent capacity to sustain life. Building upon George Lemaitre’s 1927 proposition that the universe originated with an explosion of the primeval atom — the so-called “Big Bang” — physicists now believe that if the universe had expanded with even slightly more energy there wouldn’t have been sufficiently strong gravity to allow stars and galaxies to form. A bit less energy and the universe would have collapsed back in upon itself. To postulate such “fine-tunings” — a phrase used to describe how extraordinarily precise these long-ago cosmological occurrences were — raises a thorny question, though. Did the universe develop this way in order to sustain life, or is life as we know it determined by how the universe developed? In mid-October, a group of 50 scientists met at the Harvard-
