The Physics of Immortality

"EVEN more than the separation of church and state, the separation between church and laboratory is supposed to be absolute. Science is to concentrate on describing how the universe works, leaving questions of who or what created it and why it exists to the dens of the metaphysicians. Once they agree to play by these rules, scientists the world over can worship different gods while contemplating the same equations.

The one area of science where this fire wall most often threatens to crumble is cosmology. Scientists almost all agree that the universe began with a "Big Bang." But what detonated the explosion? And why did the primordial mass unfold into this particular universe, with furnaces called stars cooking hydrogen into the carbon needed to make astronomers and theologians who can contemplate the meaning of it all?

If the expansion rate of the universe were a little slower, the Big Bang would have been stillborn. A little faster and there would not have been the leisure for any kind of matter to coalesce. If something called the fine structure constant (the square of the charge of the electron divided by the speed of light multiplied by Planck's constant) were slightly different, atoms would not exist. Our very existence seems to be either a miracle or a fluke...

continued: New York Times