The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life?

As Davies, a respected astrobiologist and physicist, showed in his previous book, The Mind of God, he can make even the most complex things seem simple. Here he returns to cosmology, and asks the big questions: where do the laws of physics come from, and what happened before the Big Bang? In particular, he addresses the “Goldilocks enigma”: “Like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be ‘just right’ for life”, and does look “as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning sentient beings”.

Davies points out many truths, always with commendable economy. When he says, simply, that “all science is a search for unification”, he expresses something that we know intuitively but have probably never formulated. He is never less than challenging. Monotheists must ponder his view that “the simple declaration ‘God did it’ provides no actual explanation for anything, unless one can also say how and why God did it”. Likewise, to proponents of the (godless) multiverse theory, he observes that it “requires a lot of unexplained and ‘convenient’ physics to make it work”.