I’ll be speaking at the Sutherland Astronomical Society on Thursday 5th November. The meeting is at Green Point Observatory, Oyster Bay at 7:30 pm.
Title: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life
Abstract: Let’s make it slightly different from the one that we are familiar with. We could change the laws of nature, just a little bit. We could change how the universe begins, or make it four-dimensional. In the last 30 years, scientists have discovered something astounding: the vast majority of these changes are disastrous. We end up with a universe containing no galaxies, no stars, no planets, no atoms, no molecules, and most importantly, no intelligent life-forms wondering what went wrong. This fact is called the fine-tuning of the universe for life. After explaining the science of what happens when you change the way our universe works, we will ask: what does all this mean?
Letters to Nature 