Matryoshka World


Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Is the universe fine tuned for making life...or black holes?

io9 has a summary of the argument presented by Lee Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos: What is the purpose of the Universe? Here is one possible answer

Smolin's Theory of Cosmological Natural Selection posits that a process analogous to biological natural selection applies to the creation of universes. From Wikipedia:
The theory surmises that a collapsing black hole causes the emergence of a new universe on the "other side", whose fundamental constant parameters (speed of light, Planck length and so forth) may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe therefore gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes. Thus the theory contains the evolutionary ideas of "reproduction" and "mutation" of universes, but has no direct analogue of natural selection. However, given any universe that can produce black holes that successfully spawn new universes, it is possible that some number of those universes will reach heat death with unsuccessful parameters. So, in a sense, fecundity cosmological natural selection is one where universes could die off before successfully reproducing, just as any biological being can die without having offspring.
 Leonard Susskind, who promotes a similar string theory landscape, stated: "I'm not sure why Smolin's idea didn't attract much attention. I actually think it deserved far more than it got"

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