Open disagreement between two leading cosmologists:
“Fine tuning” in the cosmos suggests that if the universe had even slightly different properties life as we know it would be impossible. Small tweaks to our universe’s composition could erase the periodic table, disintegrate particles, and remove all traces of structure in the cosmos.
Dr. Luke Barnes and Prof. Richard Easther are both well-established researchers in cosmology, but they disagree on the implications of the “fine tuning” science seen in the universe and whether that makes life improbable. Come and hear them wrestle through the mysteries of our cosmos and join the discussion!
Speakers:
Dr. Luke A. Barnes is a senior lecturer in Physics at Western Sydney University, with a Ph.D in Astronomy from the University of Cambridge. The focus of his research has been the cosmic evolution of matter, galaxy formation, and the fine tuning of the universe for life. Luke is a coauthor with Prof. Geraint Lewis of A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos (2016) and The Cosmic Revolutionary’s Handbook (2019), published by Cambridge University Press.
Prof. Richard Easther graduated in 1994 with a PhD from the University of Canterbury. After this he held post-doctoral fellowships at Waseda University in Japan and at Brown and Columbia Universities in the United States. He was a professor at Yale University from 2004 until the end of 2011, when he returned to New Zealand. Richard is now a professor in the Department of Physics here at the University of Auckland, with well over 200 publications to his name. Prof. Easther is an Atheist and disagrees with Luke about the implications of “fine tuning” science.