3min chapter

The Joy of Why cover image

Are There Reasons to Believe in a Multiverse?

The Joy of Why

CHAPTER

The Higgs Mass and the Structure of the Universe

The Higgs or any of the underlying physics have a lot of control over whether we exist. We can imagine rules in which there are special values of the Higgs mass, which could be extraordinarily fine-tuned. Nobody has explored the possible laws of nature from all possible underlying laws of nature. But at least at the baseline level, you do need something non-trivial to happen.

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Speaker 1
And the answer would be that the Higgs or any of the underlying physics have a lot of control over whether we exist or not. And instead of calling us us and making it anthropic or personal, we can just talk about it as structure. Here's a very simple analogy. We live on Earth. We don't live in empty space. Why don't we live in empty space? Well, of course, we are part of the Earth. We are born out of the material that made the Earth. It made us as well. Why are we near the Sun? The Earth was made near the Sun. Why are we near the Sun? Because biological beams, perhaps, aren't living in places where there are no significant sources of energy. There's no fine-tuning argument to explain why we live on a planet Earth rather than the 10 to the 60 times bigger volume, which is the rest of the empty universe. So we don't talk about that as a problem, of course. But what we can imagine is that the universe itself has different patches with different laws. And what you find with the Higgs mass is it's possible that for a huge range of Higgs masses, what we would call chemistry doesn't exist, which means molecules don't bind, which means structure cannot form in those places. Nobody has explored the possible laws of nature from all possible underlying laws of nature. In other words, if I gave you the standard model, you wouldn't come back to me and tell me about the existence of a giraffe. I can't predict a very chaotic nonlinear process to tell me what could exist there. But at least at the baseline level, you do need something which is non-trivial to happen. And you could imagine that the Higgs mass better be very low compared to the Planck scale, the quantum gravity scale, in order for structure to form in reasonable ways without
Speaker 3
creating black holes, for example.
Speaker 1
So you can imagine rules in which there are special values of the Higgs mass, which could be extraordinarily fine-tuned. But in those universes or those parts of the universe, truly non-trivial things happen, like the
Speaker 3
formation of stars and planets and anything on planets.

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