Nature's Constants. Holy cow, what are those? Are they the inch, the foot, the yard, the mile? The answer to that question is...a definite maybe.



John D. Barrow, in his fascinating book, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers that Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe, tells us that our system of measurements, such as the inch, the foot, the yard and the mile are rather useless in defining nature, because they center around human beings--what he calls, anthropometrics. For instance, consider the concept of length. Originally, lengths were derived from the length of the king's arm or the span of his hand. The yard was the length of a tape drawn from the tip of a man's nose to the farthest fingertip of his arm when stretched horizontally to one side. Distances were reckoned as a day's journey. Likewise, time followed from rising and setting of the sun and the moon. Weights were quantities that could be carried in our hands or slung over our backs. Like the man said, all those things are anthropometric, or, man-centric; and they worked just fine as long as everybody used the same system. That's all fine and dandy, but what happens when one tries to understand the entire universe including all the worlds, all the stars, and all the galaxies and all the empty space? At that level, anthro...pro...whatever, just doesn't cut it anymore. We need something else, and that's where the Constants of Nature come into the picture.



At that point, the author takes us right into the discussion of these so-called constants of nature? In a nutshell, they're the fine structure numbers that give our universe its distinctive character--an attempt to create order out of chaos. Several constants have been defined, but to name four: Pi is a constant ( = 3.14159). Newton's law of gravity is a constant (GN = 6.67259 x 10-11m3s-2kg-1). The speed of light is a constant (c = 299,792,458 m/s), and the charge of an itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny electron is another constant (e = 1.602x10-19C). Get the idea? Nobody knows why those things are what they are--don't even ask. But who cares? What's important is that wherever you go in our universe, they're the same. And that ladies and germs, is why the constants of nature are the true measuring rods of our universe.



Now notice that in the previous paragraph that I refer to our universe. I said ours because as scientists learned to define the constants of nature they began to realize that there could be more than just one universe (Twilight Zone). There could be a whole bunch of universes, and they could all be defined by their very own constants of nature. That's right. The force of gravity could be slightly stronger in another universe. Of course, that could have extreme ramifications. The stars may have collapsed sooner, and the universe itself may have completely died out without so much as a trace of its former self. So how would we know it ever existed? I don't know.



So that's a small piece of this 292-page book. First you try to understand the idea of nature's constants, and how they shaped our universe, and then you try to figure out what it would be like if they were different. Gulp. A lot of heavy thinkers worry about this stuff. By the way, the book's author, John D. Barrow, is no lightweight, anthropometrically speaking, of course. He's a Cambridge professor, so I think he knows what he's talking about.



Obviously, I couldn't write about everything in the thirteen chapters of this book. For one thing, my I.Q. is way too low. For another, there's just too much information. In my opinion, the author did a good job of spoon-feeding the information in small, easy to swallow bites, and he threw in a few tidbits of info here and there to keep the reader sharp. For instance, the author spends a lot of time telling us that the constants of nature are always the same. But then towards the end of the book he tells us that the constants may have changed. What? Does he mean that Pi hasn't always been 3.14159...? I guess so, but I can't even begin to imagine a circle where the diameter is exactly one inch and the circumference is exactly three inches. Can you? It's just too weird. So the bottom line, it seems, is that we're right back at the opening question: Are inches, yards and miles constants? Read the book. Maybe you can figure this stuff out.