Just Six Numbers
Book Review by Craig Alexander Bell
Title: Just Six Numbers
Author: Martin Rees
Publisher: Phoenix
"God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness." The Bible, Genesis 1.4
It is the nature of man to try to comprehend the world and the universe. Early man looked up at the night sky and the magnificent Orion and formed patterns and extravagant stories. One of Albert Einsteins best known aphorisms is "The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible". It expresses his amazement that the laws of physics, which our minds are somehow attuned to understand, apply not just here on Earth but also in the remotest galaxy. The present understanding of the Cosmos with dark matter, black holes etc can be bewildering. In Martin Rees's book Just Six Numbers the author reveals the six numbers upon which all physical reality rests, from atomic structure to human tissue. If any of the numbers were altered we would simply not exist. The book is accessible, very readable and written in an manner which does not require a previous knowledge of cosmology. It is brief, just 160 pages, for such an enormous subject and for a book dedicated to numbers it does not get bogged down in mathematical equations. Rees explains the ideas in simple concepts. For example the Greek letter epsilon defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. The value of epsilon is 0.007, which controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table. Carbon and oxygen are common, and gold and uranium are rare, because of what happens in the stars. If epsilon were 0.006 or 0.008, something different would happen and we could not exist.
"Man is ... related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable ... plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again." The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Some people would claim this perfection as evidence of a creator, as the slightest deviation would result in no Universe. This debate is not explored deeply in the book. But Rees opens up the debate for the concept of a Multiverse: "Separate universes may have cooled down differently, ending up governed by different numbers." Not all of Rees's assumptions are without debate; some scientists have argued that some of the fine tuning that created the Universe is not that fine!
We are on the first rung of the ladder in regards to cosmology. This books gives an entrance to the concepts which define the Universe. The very brevity and lack of overwhelming equations gives the the book a "story" feel rather than an academic exercise. The book is written for the person without prior knowledge of cosmology. A good companion book is "The Goldilocks Enigma" by Paul Davies which deals with a similar subject matter. The anthropic principle is the controversial though increasingly favoured idea that the Universe is the way it is because, if it wasn't, we could not have evolved to notice the fact.
Craig Alexander Bell.
