The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by Barrow and Tipler

Well, I have just finished this 677 page tome which includes a large number of differential equations and poorly defined words. It is written for cosmologists and is not for the casual reader. I am not a cosmologist by profession but am intrigued by the questions raised by this pursuit and while know something about differential equations, don’t know enough to truly appreciate many of the arguments presented by the authors. This book asks why the constants of nature are so nicely set as to allow our existence. If many of them were just a little different then life as we know it could not exits. If gravity were just a little stronger all would be black holes. If the charge on an electron were just a little weaker then molecules would not form. The weak anthropic principle (WAP) says that things are so good for us because if they were different we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. The strong anthropic principle (SAP) says that some one or some thing made the universe this way so that we would exist. There is also the “final anthropic principle” (FAP) which says that intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out.

At the conclusion of the book arguments are presented for life taking over the entire universe and possibly avoiding eventual collapse into the big crunch. It seems that current thinking has the universe expanding forever due to the newly discovered dark energy avoiding the big crunch altogether. The authors Borrow and Tipler published this book in 1986 so it is a little out of date. In 1986 most thought that the universe would eventually collapse in the big crunch as described in this book. It is interesting that so many people are spending so much time trying to figure this out. Most of the time scales are billions of years in the future and of little consequence to us today. However, it is fun to conjecture on Government money.

The final diagram from the book includes the Omega Point of Tipler - The Tipler Scenario: Life expands to fill the universe, which is closed. As it begins to contract, life uses its shear energy to survive and manipulate its evolution. As the universe collapses, the speed of information processing increases without bound and life evolves into an Omega Point.