Lawrence Krauss on Cosmic Natural Selection: Why the Universe Isn’t Fine-Tuned for Our Benefit April 26, 2017

Lawrence Krauss on Cosmic Natural Selection: Why the Universe Isn’t Fine-Tuned for Our Benefit

Back in February, Lawrence Krauss delivered the British Humanist Association’s annual Darwin Day Lecture. He spoke about “Cosmic natural selection” — why our universe is the way it is and why we’re lucky to be here.

That video is now online:

KraussDarwinLecture

Lawrence’s lecture unpicked creationist arguments for the fine-tuning of the universe, and he took his audience on a tour of the history of physics and our rapid advances in our understanding of the underlying nature of our universe, from Galileo to Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Peter Higgs, with his narrative culminating in the 2013 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which seemingly proves Peter Higgs’ postulation of a field throughout the universe that can account for the massiveness of elementary particles.

With the Higgs boson further cementing the standard model of particle physics, we can be even more confident that our existence is a matter of chance, and that ‘the universe is not fine-tuned to our existence. We are fine-tuned to exist in the universe,’ said Krauss. He concluded on a note of wonder and appreciation for the grand cosmic accident of our existence: ‘Don’t be scared of living in a universe that doesn’t give a damn about you,’ he said, ‘and instead, enjoy your brief time in the sun.’

I haven’t had a chance to watch the entire lecture yet, but if any parts stand out, please leave the timestamp/summary in the comments!

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