Word: cosmos
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Dealing with cranks is an occupational hazard for most scientists, but it's especially bad for physicists and astronomers. Those who study the cosmos for a living tend to be bombarded with letters, calls and emails from would-be geniuses who insist they have refuted Einstein or devised a new theory of gravity or disproved the Big Bang. The telltale signs of crankdom are so consistent--a grandiose theory, minimal credentials, a messianic zeal--that scientists can usually spot them a mile...
Given that we haven't found any life beyond Earth yet, "remarkably hospitable" may sound a bit strong. At a deep level, though, it's true. Many of the most fundamental characteristics of our cosmos--the relative strengths of gravity, electromagnetism and the forces that operate inside atomic nuclei as well as the masses and relative abundances of different particles--are so finely tuned that if just one of them were even slightly different, life as we know it couldn't exist...
...proposition that the cosmos is--against all odds--perfectly tuned for life is known as the anthropic principle. And while it has been getting a lot of attention lately, there is no consensus on how seriously to take it. Some scientists are confident that there is a law that dictates the values of those key cosmic numbers, and when we find it, the anthropic problem will go away. Others think the answer is even simpler: if the numbers were any different than they are, we wouldn't be around to argue about them--case closed. "The anthropic principle," complains Fermilab...
...contends, it might be with the cosmos. What we think of as the "universe," argues Rees, could well be just one of trillions of universes on an indescribably vaster stage called the multiverse. Each of those universes would have different laws and characteristics. Most of them are totally unlivable; like Earth, ours just happens to be one of the lucky ones...
Colleagues in the John Mack Institute stated that through Mack’s clinical care of people who have survived disturbing events, he found his own sense of spiritual enrichment. Mack dedicated his last book Passport to the Cosmos, published in 1999, “To the experiencers, who have been my teachers...