Being a little bit OCD at times - estimating, counting, measuring, noticing whether any number that innocently occurs in my life is a prime or at least has some interesting factors - an interesting number day is worth a post.

First, I regaled Hipbone with the Tozier tale of the Ebay sale of a low Erdos number and now this.

The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10¹²². . . which is bigger than the number of particles in the Universe — keeps popping up when several of the physical constants and parameters of the Universe are combined.

10⁴⁰ also gets some discussion.

A similar ‘large-number coincidence’ was noted in the 1930s by the astronomer Arthur Eddington and the physicist Paul Dirac. They saw that several other combinations, such as the ratio of the electrostatic attraction between an electron and a proton to the gravitational attraction, are equal to about 10⁴⁰. . .

Funkhouser notes that 10¹²² is about equal to the cube of 10⁴⁰. Is there some reason why the two sets of large numbers should be linked in that way? It would follow, Funkhouser says, if there happens to be a certain mathematical relationship linking the mass of a nucleon (a proton or neutron) with the speed of light, the gravitational constant, Planck’s constant and the cosmological constant.

That sounds pretty exotic, but in fact such a link was proposed in 1967 by the Russian physicist Yakov Zel’dovich based on an entirely separate argument. And he’s not the only one to suggest this.

“The interesting thing is that the relationship has been proposed before by several different authors, each with a different explanation,” says Funkhouser. And in a separate paper, he’s come up with yet another justification for it. “I have shown that a simple model for the origin of our Universe involving ten spatial dimensions leads naturally to this relation,” he says. It follows if seven of the dimensions shrank while the other three “puffed out” to form the reality we observe today.

Phil Bowermaster, geeking about the same article:

How about this? What we've managed to do is to uncover a little bit of the source code with which the computer program that we call "the universe" was written. We can see patterns in the code -- amazing numeric coincidences! -- but we still don't know its rules, syntax, etc.We're astounded to find these "coincidences" that would immediately stop being astounding if we knew anything about this underlying structure.

But this raises the question -- which I think we've tossed around before -- about whether source code is merely an analogy, or whether things like this numeric coincidence provide us an extremely remote and yet valid view into the minds of someone, or some group of beings, who exist (or existed) entirely outside of this universe and are responsible for its being here.

And even if it is a remote and very faint view that we have, i think we can say one thing for certain about these beings.

They're geeks.

I tend more toward the random distribution view: anything that can happen, will happen, given enough iterations. That our instance of all the universes that have so far been instantiated includes the possibility, and so eventual certainty, of us, is an interesting coincidence . . . unless we find a way to beat chance.