Natural selection and cosmology

I’ve just finished reading a book called “COSM” by Gregory Benford. The story is about a universe which is created by accident in a particle accelerator and which manifests in our universe as a small shiny ball – COSM is a truncation of cosmos. Benford is a physicist and the ideas that he has in the book are based on ideas which have actually appeared in physics papers.

Apart from the whole concept that it might be possible to create a universe by smashing together particles at high energy, which is fascinating in itself, he also briefly mentions the idea that if universes can effectively create other universes then the evolutionary concept of natural selection may apply to them. So, the reason that our universe seems to be so finely tuned for life is that those universes which are favourable for the existence of intelligent life are more likely to “reproduce” (since said intelligence may create other universes by design or accident), similar to the Darwinian concept of biological evolution – I guess that could make our “God” a physicist in another universe !!!

Of course, it still doesn’t address the question of how the first universe happened, which seems to “mirror” the problem in biology of how the first living thing appeared.

The relevant articles are “Is it possible to create a universe in the laboratory by quantum tunneling?” by Alan Guth and co which appeared in Nuclear Physics, B 339, p 417 in 1990 (I can only find the abstract online) and one by Edward Harrison which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 36, pages 193-203 (which I can’t even find the title of). There is however a Popular Science article on the whole idea written by Marcus Chown here.