For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the implications of seemingly impossible cosmic coincidences.
A woman enters a casino, sits down at a high-stakes poker table, and draws a royal flush. She cashes in her winnings, walks to the casino next door, and does the same thing. Then she goes to a third casino and draws a third royal flush. What is a dispassionate observer to make of this scenario? Is it merely a highly improbable occurrence (although no more improbable — just more lucrative — than drawing the same losing hand three times over)? Casinos may believe that in general one person in a thousand is a cheater while the rest play with random hands. But the fact of our player’s lucky streak should significantly shift the likelihood that the alternative ‘cheater’ hypothesis is correct.
John Hawthorne is a philosopher at USC who studies the intricacies of epistemology — the field that examines how we come to our beliefs, and when those beliefs are justified. In recent years, he’s been thinking about what a careful epistemologist might have to say about certain coincidences — some of which seem far more unlikely than a triple-royal-flush — that have recently been observed in particle physics and related fields. Most of these coincidences have to do with the very specific values of universal constants — the masses of subatomic particles, the strengths of atomic forces, or the value of a physical parameter known as the cosmological constant — which seem to be highly improbable from the perspective of physics, but upon whose precise values the entire possibility of a galaxy-filled, life-sustaining universe seems to hang.