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A fine-tuned universe was surely a result of evolution

Published 10 May 2023

From Ken Goddard, Musbury, Devon, UK

I have been waiting for a letter like Mike Lawrence’s to appear here(Letters, 22 April).

The sequence – the trick– used to evolve the wondrous outcome of terrestrial nature here on Earth is survival of the fittest under a continuously changing environment.

In my opinion, it is no surprise that the universe deployed the same sequence to evolve, astonishingly quickly, the very special values for the six fundamental constants in physics that set the scene for this.

That is to say, the same evolutionary sequence is what must have been going on at the front end of what has been labelled inflation: all the possible combinations of those values being tried out (budding off) and failing to thrive at the very first fence, except for the unique combination that enabled inflation to continue to produce the initial plasma of pure energy, which, in turn, eventually formed the first hydrogen atoms, and so on, and on.

Issue no. 3438 published 13 May 2023