PBS Space Time

The Crisis In Physics: Is The Universe Random Or Finely Tuned?

Did God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different fundamental constants. Or is this one vast and complex universe the inevitable result of an inevitable and unique underlying principle, perhaps expressible as a supremely elegant Theory of Everything. It certainly seems that Einstein thought this should be the case … that God had no choice in whether or how to create the world. It seems like a pretty arm-chair philosophical and perhaps unanswerable question, but the modern “problem” of naturalness may lead to an answer.