Life like our own will end. Survivors will need to have changed their form, their homes and their nature to such an extent that we would be challenged to call their continued existence ‘living’ by our own standards today.

We have recognised the simple secrets of chaos and unpredictability which beset so many parts of the world around us. We understand our changing weather but we cannot predict it. We have appreciated the similarities between complexities like this and those that emerge from systems of human interaction – societies, economies, choices, ecosystems – and from within the human mind itself.

All these perplexing complexities rush along and seek to convince us that the world is like a runaway roller-coaster, rocking and rolling; that everything we once held to be true might one day be overthrown. Some even see such a prospect as a reason to be suspicious of science3 as a corrosive effect upon the foundations of human nature and certainty, as though the construction of the physical Universe and the vast schema of its laws should have been set up with our psychological fragility in mind.

But there is a sense in which all this change and unpredictability is an illusion. It is not the whole story about the nature of the Universe. There is both a conservative and a progressive side to the deep structure of reality. Despite the incessant change and dynamic of the visible world, there are aspects of the fabric of the Universe which are mysterious in their unshakeable constancy. It is these mysterious unchanging things that make our Universe what it is and distinguish it from other worlds that we might imagine. There is a golden thread that weaves a continuity through Nature. It leads us to expect that certain things elsewhere in space will be the same as they are here on Earth; that they were and will be the same at other times as they are today; that for some things neither history nor geography matter. Indeed, perhaps without such a substratum of unchanging realities there could be no surface currents of change or any complexities of mind and matter at all.

These bedrock ingredients of our Universe are what this book is about. Their existence is one of the last mysteries of science that has challenged a succession of great physicists to come up with an explanation for why they are as they are. Our quest is to discover what they are but we have long known only what to call them. They are the constants of Nature. They lie at the root of sameliness in the Universe: why every electron seems to be the same as every other electron.

The constants of Nature encode the deepest secrets of the Universe. They express at once our greatest knowledge and our greatest ignorance about the cosmos. Their existence has taught us the profound truth that Nature abounds with unseen regularities. Yet, while we have become skilled at measuring the values of these constant quantities, our inability to explain or predict their values shows how much we have still to learn about the inner workings of the Universe.

What is the ultimate status of the constants of Nature? Are they truly constant? Are they everywhere the same? Are they all linked? Could life have evolved and persisted if they were even slightly different? These are some of the issues that this book will grapple with. It will look back to the discoveries of the first constants of Nature and the impact they had on scientists and theologians looking for Mind, purpose and design in Nature. It will show what frontier science now believes constants of Nature to be and whether a future Theory of Everything, if it exists, will one day reveal the true secret of the constants of Nature. And most important of all, it will ask whether they are truly constant.

chapter two
Journey Towards
Ultimate Reality

‘Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards.’

Alan Bennett1

MISSION TO MARS

‘The Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board has determined that the root cause for the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft was the failure to use metric units.’

NASA Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Report2

In the last week of September 1998 NASA was getting ready to hit the press agencies with a big story. The Mars Climate Explorer, designed to skim through the upper atmosphere of Mars, was about to send back important data about the Martian atmosphere and climate. Instead, it just crashed into the Martian surface. In NASA's words,

‘The MCO spacecraft, designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was launched by a Delta rocket on December 11th, 1998, from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Florida. After a cruise to Mars of approximately 9fi months, the spacecraft fired its main engine to go into orbit around Mars at around 2 a.m. PDT on September 23, 1999. Five minutes into the planned 16-minute burn, the spacecraft passed behind the planet as seen from Earth.