by Robert Lanza
happens when two extremely fast-moving atomic nuclei or protons
collide and fuse to form a heavier element that is usually helium, but
can be even heavier, especially as the star ages. Carbon should not
be capable of being manufactured by this process because all the
intermediate steps from helium to carbon involve highly unstable
nuclei. The only way for its creation would be for three helium nuclei to collide at the same time. But the likelihood of three helium nuclei
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colliding at the identical microsecond, even in the frenzied interiors
of stars, are minuscule. It was Fred Hoyle—not of the card rules
fame, but the one who championed the steady state theory of an eter-
nal universe until that grand idea’s sad demise in the 1960s—who
correctly figured out that something unusual and amazing must be at
play in the interior of stars that could vastly increase the odds of this
rare three-way collision, and give the universe the abundant carbon
found in every living creature. The trick here was a kind of “reso-
nance,” where disparate effects can come together to form something
unexpected, the way the wind resonated with the structure of the
original Tacoma Narrows Bridge more than six decades ago, causing
it to sway violently and collapse. Bingo: turns out, carbon has a reso-
nant state at just the correct energy to let stars create it in significant
quantities. The carbon resonance, in turn, directly depends on the
value of the strong force, which is what glues together everything in
each atomic nucleus out to the farthest villages of space-time.
The strong force is still somewhat mysterious, yet is critical to
the universe we know. Its influence only extends within the con-
fines of an atom. Indeed, its strength falls off so quickly it’s already
anemic at the edges of large atoms. This is why giant atoms such as
uranium are so unstable. The outermost protons and neutrons in
their nuclei lie at the fringes of the clump, where the strong force
retains only a fragile hold, so occasionally one does overcome the
otherwise iron-like grip of the strong force and falls off, changing
the atom into something else.
If the strong force and gravity are so amazingly tweaked, we
can’t ignore the electromagnetic force that holds sway in the electri-
cal and magnetic connections found in all atoms. Discussing it, the
great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said in his book The
Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton University Press, 1985):
“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty
years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on
their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know
where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π or
perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of
g o L d i L o C K s ’ s U N i v e r s e
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the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes
to us with no understanding by man. You might say the ‘hand of
God’ wrote that number, and ‘we don’t know how He pushed his
pencil.’ We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to mea-
sure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of
dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, with-
out putting it in secretly!”
It amounts to 1/137 when the units are filled in, and what it sig-
nifies is a constant of electromagnetism, another of the four funda-
mental forces, that helps facilitate the existence of atoms and allows
the entire visible universe to exist. Any small change in its value and
none of us are here.
Such factual oddities powerfully influence modern cosmological
thinking. After all, mustn’t cosmologists’ theories plausibly explain
why we live in such a highly unlikely reality?
“Not at all,” said Princeton physicist Robert Dicke in papers
written in the sixties and elaborated upon by Brandon Carter in
1974. This perspective was dubbed “the Anthropic Principle.” Carter
explained that what we can expect to observe “must be restricted by
the conditions necessary for our presence as observers.” Put another
way, if gravity was a hair stronger or the Big Bang a sliver weaker,
and therefore the universe’s lifespan significantly shorter, we couldn’t be here to think about it. Because we’re here, the universe has to be the way it is and therefore isn’t unlikely at all. Case closed.
By this reasoning, there’s no need for cosmological gratitude.
Our seemingly fortuitous, suspiciously specific locale, temperature
range, chemical and physical milieus are just what’s needed to pro-
duce life. If we’re here, then this is what we must find around us.
Such reasoning is now known as the “weak” version of the
Anthropic Principle or WAP. The “strong” version, one that skirts
the edges of philosophy even more closely but clearly supports bio-
centrism, says that the universe must have those properties that
allow life to develop within it because it was obviously “designed”
with the goal of generating and sustaining observers. But without
biocentrism, the strong anthropic principle has no mechanism for
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explaining why the universe must have life-sustaining properties.
Going even further, the late physicist John Wheeler (1911–2008),
who coined the term “black hole,” advocated what is now called
the Participatory Anthropic Principle (PAP): observers are required
to bring the universe into existence. Wheeler’s theory says that any
pre-life Earth would have existed in an indeterminate state, like
Schrödinger’s cat. Once an observer exists, the aspects of the uni-
verse under observation become forced to resolve into one state, a
state that includes a seemingly pre-life Earth. This means that a pre-
life universe can only exist retroactively after the fact of consciousness. (Because time is an illusion of consciousness, as we shall see
shortly, this whole talk of before and after isn’t strictly correct but
provides a way of visualizing things.)
If the universe is in a non-determined state until forced to resolve
by an observer, and this non-determined state included the deter-
mination of the various fundamental constants, then the resolution
would necessarily fall in such a way that allows for an observer, and
therefore the constants would have to resolve in such a way as to
allow life. Biocentrism therefore supports and builds upon John
Wheeler’s conclusions about where quantum theory leads, and pro-
vides a solution to the anthropic problem that is unique and more
reasonable than any alternative.
While the latter two versions of the Anthropic Principle, need-
less to say, strongly support biocentrism, many in the astronomi-
cal community seem to embrace the simplest anthropic version, at
least guardingly. “I like the weak anthropic principle,” said astrono-
mer Alex Filippenko of the University of California, when one of the
authors asked his opinion. “Used appropriately, it has some predic-
tive value.” After all, he added, “Small changes to seemingly boring
properties of the universe could have easily produced a universe in
which nobody would have been around to be bored.”
Ah, but the point is that it didn’t and couldn’t.
To be honest and present all views, however, it should be noted
that some critics wonder whether the Weak Anthropic Principle is no
more than a piece of circular reasoning or a facile way of squirming
g o L d i L o C K s ’ s U N i v e r s e
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out of explaining the enormous peculiarities of the physical uni-
verse. Philosopher John Leslie, in his 1989 book Universes (there is a 1996 reprint edition), says, “A man in front of a firing squad of
one hundred riflemen is going to be pretty surprised if every bullet
misses him. Sure he could say to himself, ‘Of course they all missed;
that makes perfect sense, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to wonder
why they all missed.’ But anyone in his or her right mind is going to
want to know how such an unlikely event occurred.”
But biocentrism provides the explanation for why all the shots
missed. If the universe is created by life, then no universe that didn’t
allow for life could possibly exist. This fits very neatly into quantum
theory and John Wheeler’s participatory universe in which observers
are required to bring the universe into existence. Because, if indeed there ever was such a time, the universe was in an undetermined
probability state before the presence of observers (some probabili-
ties—or most—not allowing for life), when observation began and
the universe collapsed into a real state, it inevitably collapsed into
a state that allowed for the observation that collapsed it. With bio-
centrism, the mystery of the Goldilocks universe goes away, and
the critical role of life and consciousness in shaping the universe
becomes clear.
So you either have an astonishingly improbable coincidence
revolving around the indisputable fact that the cosmos could have
any properties but happens to have exactly the right ones for life
or else you have exactly what must be seen if indeed the cosmos is
biocentric. Either way, the notion of a random billiard-ball cosmos
that could have had any forces that boast any range of values, but
instead has the weirdly specific ones needed for life, looks impos-
sible enough to seem downright silly.
And if any of this seems too preposterous, just consider the alter-
native, which is what contemporary science asks us to believe: that
the entire universe, exquisitely tailored for our existence, popped
into existence out of absolute nothingness. Who in their right mind
would accept such a thing? Has anyone offered any credible sugges-
tion for how, some 14 billion years ago, we suddenly got a hundred
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trillion times more than a trillion trillion trillion tons of matter
from—zilch? Has anyone explained how dumb carbon, hydrogen,
and oxygen molecules could have, by combining accidentally, become
sentient—aware!—and then utilized this sentience to acquire a taste
for hot dogs and the blues? How any possible natural random pro-
cess could mix those molecules in a blender for a few billion years
so that out would pop woodpeckers and George Clooney? Can any-
one conceive of any edges to the cosmos? Infinity? Or how particles
still spring out of nothingness? Or conceive of any of the many sup-
posed extra dimensions that must exist everywhere in order for the
cosmos to consist fundamentally of interlocking strings and loops?
Or explain how ordinary elements can ever rearrange themselves
so that they continue to acquire self-awareness and a loathing for
macaroni salad? Or, again, how every one of dozens of forces and
constants are precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life?
Is it not obvious that science only pretends to explain the cosmos
on its fundamental level?
By reminding us of its great successes at figuring out interim
processes and the mechanics of things, and fashioning marvelous
new devices out of raw materials, science gets away with patently
ridiculous “explanations” for the nature of the cosmos as a whole.
If only it hadn’t given us HDTV and the George Foreman grill, it
wouldn’t have held our attention and respect long enough to pull the
old three-card Monte when it comes to these largest issues.
Unless one awards points for familiarity and repetition, a con-
sciousness-based universe scarcely seems far-fetched when com-
pared with the alternatives.
We can now add another principle:
First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a
process that involves our consciousness.
Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal per-
ceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the
same coin and cannot be separated.
Third Principle of Biocentrism: The behavior of subatomic par-
ticles—indeed all particles and objects—is inextricably linked to
g o L d i L o C K s ’ s U N i v e r s e
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the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious
observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability
waves.
Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, “mat-
ter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe
that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability
state.
Fifth Principle of Biocentrism: The very structure of the uni-
verse is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is
fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the
universe, not the other way around. The universe is simply the
complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
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no tIme to lose
From wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of Space—Out of Time
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Dreamland” (1845)
Because quantum theory increasingly casts doubts about the
existence of time as we know it, let’s head straight into this sur-
prisingly ancient scientific issue. As irrelevant as it might first
appear, the presence or absence of time is an important factor in any
fundamental look into the nature of the cosmos.
According to biocentrism, our sense of the forward motion of
time is really only the result of an unreflective participation in a
world of infinite activities and outcomes that only seems to result in a smooth, continuous path.
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At each moment, we are at the edge of a paradox known as “The
Arrow,” first described twenty-five hundred years ago by the philos-
opher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically with the premise that nothing
can be in two places at once, he reasoned that an arrow is only in
one location during any given instant of its flight. But if it is in only
one place, it must momentarily
be at rest. The arrow must then be
present somewhere, at some specific location, at every moment of its
trajectory. Logically, then, motion per se is not what is really occur-
ring. Rather, it is a series of separate events. This may be a first indi-
cation that the forward motion of time—of which the movement of
the arrow is an embodiment—is not a feature of the external world
but a projection of something within us , as we tie together things we
are observing. By this reasoning, time is not an absolute reality but a feature of our minds.
In truth, the reality of time has long been questioned by an odd
alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the
past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are solely
neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment.
Philosophers maintain that the future is similarly nothing more
than a mental construct, an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts.
Because thinking itself occurs strictly in the “now”—where is time?
Does time exist on its own, apart from human concepts that are
no more than conveniences for our formulas or for the description
of motion and events? In this way, simple logic alone casts doubt
on whether there exists anything outside of an “eternal now” that
includes the human mind’s tendency to think and daydream.
Physicists, for their part, find that all working models for real-
ity—from Newton’s laws and Einstein’s field equations through
quantum mechanics—have no need for time. They are all time-
symmetrical. Time is a concept looking for a function—except when
we’re speaking about a change, as in acceleration, but change (usu-
ally symbolized by the Greek capital letter delta or Δ) is not the same
thing as time, as we shall see.
Popularly speaking, time is often called “the fourth dimension.”
This usually throws people for a loop because time in daily life bears
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no resemblance to the three spatial realms, which, to review basic
geometry, are:
Lines, which are one-dimensional. except in string theory, which
offers an exception to one-dimensional lines: its threads of energy/
particles are so thin they’re stretched-out points that do not quite
constitute an actual coordinate. The ratio of their negligible thick-
