Design or Accident?

Prof. Frank Wilczek from MIT writes in the May issue of Physics Today about fundamental constants. Max Planck on discovering the constant that bears his name organized several fundamental constants to calculate what we now know as Planck's length, time, and energy.

As you may remember from school physics, all physical quantities can be expressed in units of length, time, and mass. One could say, that every ponderable object of our physical Universe, at some level is related to deep fundamental notions of space-time-matter.

The question is, are the values of these fundamental constants an accident, or were they "fixed" by some higher being?

There are books written about this question with different answers, here I just add my answer.

This is a meme. I am not going to be completely original. This is just my current version of the answer. By writing it here it becomes part of the noosphere, or blogsphere, or memespace, or memeland.

If you think of Design as the left, and Accident as the right side of the spectrum of answers, mine is veering towards the right. I definitely believe in some design, but it is design by the Universe itself. I do not believe that there was a previous Universe to this one that had a plan for us. I prefer a self contained answer, all in this Universe.

In the beginning the Universe was so simple that it did not have any plans, for itself or for us."US" means sentient living organisms.

I believe in Emergence, from a simple Universe, a more interesting and complex one is constructing itself. The answer is then:

In the beginning there was no plan, all fundamental constants were equally likely, as time passes, and good things are found, they are kept. Good is what remains.

Nowadays all constants have just the right values to keep good things going. I believe in a self-regulated Universe. Constantly tweeking the knobs, until all conditions are right. If we are good, we will be invited to play with the knobs.

We have not been very good. We are taking our house to the brink of destruction. Global Warming is already the result of our careless management of the house we were given. We better believe it, there is no plan for us to stay here, if we don't help it happen, we won't be around to the end of our Solar System.