#serendipity

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

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for. ↗

— Lois McMaster Bujold

#serendipity #writing #writing-process #bizarre

You know being relevant or coming up with something interesting, funny to say about what's current is just as hard as it might ever be depending on the serendipity of it all. ↗

— Lily Tomlin

#being #coming #current #depending #ever

Politics is a lot of serendipity. You're in the right place and the right time and you've got the right message, and it either connects for you or, or it doesn't. ↗

— Jon Huntsman, Jr.

#either #got #lot #message #place

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery. ↗

— Jeff Bezos

#discovery #involved #serendipity

Politics is so much about serendipity that we've got to have a bigger pool of women, so that when people drop out of the process, you've got others to turn to. ↗

— Eleanor Clift

#bigger #drop #got #much #others

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make. ↗

— Tim Berners Lee

#know #make #people #serendipity #will

In reality, serendipity accounts for one percent of the blessings we receive in life, work and love. The other 99 percent is due to our efforts. ↗

— Peter McWilliams

#blessings #due #efforts #life #love

Of course, that’s how life is. A turn of events may seem very small at the time it’s happening, but you never really know, do you? How can you? ↗

— Tom Xavier

#future #kidlit #novel #serendipity #ya

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance. ↗

— William A. Dembski

#chance #coincidence #darwinism #evolution #god-of-the-gaps