Brandon Carter

This British cosmologist working in France started the modern version of Dirac's big number hypothesis. I find it interesting that Dirac was the son of an Englishman born in Switzerland that worked in England, and Carter is British and working in France. Coincidences, but then again at some level the Anthropic Principle, as it is called now, is all about coincidences. At another level from my perspective as a Mexican working in the United States; England and France are the same thing. Actually now Sarkozy, President of France, seems to be closer to Bush than Brown, Prime Minister of England, is.

Carter's revision of Dirac was going nowhere, until String theorist got lost and could not predict the mass of the electron, so they chose the best next thing, put all fundamental numbers together and make number soup. Maybe this number will come out of it if one just stirs it just right, like a modern day Goldilocks would.

In his recent note I posted below, Carter tells us that one second is the scale of human consciousness, and one can calculate it, by requiring that we move around 10 m/s with a given complexity of our proteins. That tells us our size, and the time it takes for one thought.

So I guess I could say that this is the time in the history of the Universe, and the place where thoughts can be made. Just like many billions of years ago, time was ripe for hydrogen atoms.

Our purpose then is to make as many thoughts as possible.