Not Your Daddy’s Universe

A few years ago, I wrote a story called “Send Them Flowers” in which the protagonist was able to shift to universes in which the fine-structure constant (otherwise known as alpha) was slightly different from our own.

We skipped through the borderlands of Probability, edging farther and farther away from the safe universes that had become so much less safe for us, and into the fringe areas where stars were cloudy smears of phosphorescent gas and the Periodic Table wasn’t a guide, but a series of ever-more-hopeful suggestions . . . freaky Probability was fizzing in our veins.  Our metabolisms were pumped by a shift in the electromagnetic fine structure constant.  Oxygen was captured and transported and burned and united with carbon and exhaled with greater efficiency.  We didn’t have to breathe as often as in our home Probability, and still our bodies ran a continuous fever from the boost in our metabolic rate.

Another few more steps into Probability and the multiverse would start fucking with the strong and weak nuclear forces, causing our bodies to fly apart or the calcium in our bones to turn radioactive.  But here, we remained more or less ourselves even as certain chemical reactions become much easier.

Looks like the story might not have needed those extra universes after all.

Sage pointed me at an article in the Economist that had been sitting on my coffee table for the last week, in which it is pointed out that the electromagnetic fine-structure constant may vary . . . within our own universe!

Why alpha takes on the precise value it does, so delicately fine-tuned for life, is a deep scientific mystery. A new piece of astrophysical research may, however, have uncovered a crucial piece of the puzzle. In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia presents evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to scrutiny they will have profound implications—for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it. Instead of the whole universe being fine-tuned for life, then, humanity finds itself in a corner of space where, Goldilocks-like, the values of the fundamental constants happen to be just right for it.

Turns out that looking in one direction, alpha is a wee bit smaller than we find it here.  And looking in the opposite direction, alpha is just a teeny-tiny bit larger.

This isn’t how universes are supposed to work, folks.  The laws within universes are supposed to be, well, universal. (That’s why we call them universes!)

So now universal laws just depend on which way you’re looking.  I don’t know about you, but I find this kind of depressing.

(It’s going to be about twelve seconds before someone works out some way that this justifies believing in UFOs, astrology, and spoon-bending.  Wanna bet?)

This is so awesome that the consequences simply escape my brain.   I’m finding my preconceptions totally challenged here.  So I’m going to do what I usually do when this happens— I’m going to have a drink and sulk!

Guys, are you with me?