26:42The Most Controversial Idea In Physics
Petr Lebedev spends 27 minutes on cosmological fine tuning, the question he says has had a tab open in his brain for a decade, with astrophysicist Geraint Lewis supplying the physics. It starts with the Hoyle resonance at 7.65 MeV, the excited carbon state Fred Hoyle predicted in 1953 purely because carbon exists in quantity, then turns the other dials one at a time: weaken the strong force a few percent and deuterium unbinds so no star ever ignites, reverse the neutron proton mass difference and hydrogen decays, wind dark energy up a hundredfold and no galaxy assembles. The centerpiece is the vacuum catastrophe, quantum field theory overshooting the measured cosmological constant by a factor of 10 to the 120, alongside Steven Weinberg's 1987 prediction of a small positive value derived from nothing but the fact that we and large galaxies exist. Lebedev lays out the four available responses, selection effect, deeper theory, a fine tuner, and the multiverse, notes that Lewis wrote the standard book with a theist coauthor, and then refuses to resolve it. There is no bow on this one, and he says so.