Where did the Universe come from?
Part 3: Why the Big Bang was the most precisely planned event in all of history
In your kitchen cabinet, you've probably got a spray bottle with an adjustable nozzle. If you twist the nozzle one way, it sprays a fine mist into the air. You twist the nozzle the other way, it squirts a jet of water
in a straight line. You turn that nozzle to the exact position you want so you can wash a mirror, clean up
a spill, or whatever.
If the universe had expanded a little faster, the matter would have sprayed out into space like fine mist from a water bottle - so fast that a gazillion particles of dust would speed into infinity and never even
form a single star.
If the universe had expanded just a little slower, the material would have dribbled out like big drops of water, then collapsed back where it came
from by the force of gravity.
A little too fast, and you get a meaningless spray of fine dust. A little too slow, and the whole universe collapses back into one big black hole.
The surprising thing is just how narrow the difference is. To strike the perfect balance between too fast and
too slow, the force, something that physicists call "the Dark Energy Term" had to be accurate to one part in
ten with 120 zeros.
If you wrote this as a decimal, the number would look like this:
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000 000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000
1
In their paper "Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant" two atheist scientists from Stanford University stated that the existence of this dark energy term would have required a miracle..."An unknown agent"
intervened in cosmic history "for reasons of its own."