Books like Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe

[Original review, November 2008]This book blew me away... I hadn't been paying attention, and had missed a scientific revolution that had happened right under my nose! To cut to the chase: either someone created the Universe expressly to make it suitable for living beings, or there are lots of universes, and we just happen to be in one of the rare ones that support life. Right now, there don't seem to be many other serious alternatives. If you have trouble believing this, get Rees's excellent book. It will change the way you think about things._______________________________[Postscript, December 2008]I was just looking at Trevor's review, and thought I would update my own. Here are a couple more thoughts. First, much as I hate saying it, the creationists have a stronger position now than they've had for the last 300 years. There's something really odd about the way the physical constants are so finely tuned. Some of them need to be correct to multiple decimal places. Of course, when I say "creationists", I don't mean people who claim the world was made 10,000 years ago. I mean the faction who agree that most of science is correct, but want some Creator to have started the whole thing off.I don't see that it's a real counter-argument that God wouldn't have anything to do for the next 13 billion years. Maybe time passes very differently for Him. Maybe He isn't really at all interested in what we're up to, and is only omnipotent and omniscient in a narrow technical sense. Suppose, as an extreme example, that our whole universe was a simulation that some student had set up as a term project in the university's quantum computer. We see 13 billion years, but from His point of view He is running us over the weekend. He's an ordinary 19 year old, He's only doing it to pass Cosmology 101, and He even copied the critical parameter settings from a friend as some students do. I don't actually see why it's inconsistent with the observed data! There could be a short story in this. I'm sorry if religious people find the above horribly blasphemous. All I'm saying is: one explanation of the facts is that the universe was created, but we can deduce nothing at all from that about the nature of the Creator._______________________________[Postscript, August 2012]I have read a good deal more cosmology since I first came across Just Six Numbers in 2006, and thought I would re-read it to see what difference this had made. I'm pleased to say that the book still comes across a fine piece of work, and if you want to get a quick introduction to cosmology I strongly recommend it. The writing is excellent. It was published in 1999. Rees made some predictions about what might happen over the next ten years. I was interested to see how they had worked out:Prediction 1. Mainly thanks to the upcoming WMAP satellite, we would have much better values for Ω, Λ and \ Q\ (roughly, the extent to which space is curved, the strength of Dark Energy, and the graininess of the universe). Ω would probably turn out to be 1 (flat space), and \ Q\ would be about 10^-5.This definitely came out as he said it would. If anything, we understand the large-scale structure of the universe better than we expected.Prediction 2. We would know what "dark matter" is made of.Alas, we still don't. I am not even sure if we are significantly closer to finding out.Prediction 3. We would have a solid "Theory of Everything" which unified the four forces of nature, and which would probably be based on superstring theory.This has also failed to happen - though we have at least confirmed that the Higgs particle exists, which makes his scenarios for the very early universe a little less speculative._______________________________[Postscript, September 2018]And another update:Prediction 1. Mainly thanks to the upcoming WMAP satellite, we would have much better values for Ω, Λ and \ Q\ (roughly, the extent to which space is curved, the strength of Dark Energy, and the graininess of the universe). Ω would probably turn out to be 1 (flat space), and \ Q\ would be about 10^-5.This has all worked out 100%.Prediction 2. We would know what "dark matter" is made of.We still don't know. Experiments to try and detect hypothetical dark matter particles have not produced any conclusive results. There is a decent summary of the situation as of early 2014 in the second half of Freese's \ The Cosmic Cocktail\ , but none of the optimistic predictions there have been fulfilled.One interesting new idea has turned up following the 2016 LIGO gravitational wave results: it's just about possible that the dark matter could consist of large primordial black holes, of the kind found by LIGO. But this idea isn't very popular.Prediction 3. We would have a solid "Theory of Everything" which unified the four forces of nature, and which would probably be based on superstring theory.Superstring theory is not doing well. The predicted supersymmetric partners have failed to show up at the LHC. While they haven't been completely excluded by experiment, most people are now assuming that they aren't there.Loop Quantum Gravity has however become considerably more respectable. There's a good summary of that in Rovelli's \ Reality is Not What It Seems\ .