For the reason that opening act of the universe 13.8 billion years in the past, a various set of characters have trod the boards – stars, planets, moons, quasars. However when you are likely to get fidgety on the theatre, there’s dangerous information: this cosmic efficiency has at the very least 100 billion years to go. Which raises a query: are we residing at a particular second – the cliffhanger earlier than the interval – or is that this simply an inconsequential second within the mid-plot?

One trace that it is a particular on the spot entails a swathe of noticed properties of the universe referred to as elementary constants. These embody the energy of gravity, for instance, and the fine-structure fixed, referred to as alpha, which determines the way in which matter and lightweight work together and thus how stars burn. If these numbers have been only a shade completely different from how they’re, then life could be unattainable.

Why is all of it so good? One doable reply is that these constants aren’t so fixed. Maybe they’ve been regularly altering over the lifetime of the universe and we occur to dwell at an auspicious blip in time. John Webb on the College of Cambridge has spent a long time investigating this concept, in his case in relation to alpha. Primarily based on precision measurements of the cosmos, Webb has claimed prior to now that alpha has certainly morphed – though he now thinks those claims were wrong…