Martin Rees’ Just Six Numbers: A Dated Book About an Unsolved Problem
Cover image: Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees, published by Basic Books. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. William Poundstone’s The Doomsday Calculation sent me back to Martin Rees’ Just Six Numbers , a book I first read perhaps ten or twelve years ago. I remembered it as a compact and convincing tour through cosmological fine-tuning. Rereading it now was stranger. The book unmistakably belongs to the scientific world of 1999, yet the deepest questions it asks remain almost embarrassingly current. Physics and astronomy have advanced enormously since then. We have found the Higgs boson, detected gravitational waves, mapped the cosmic microwave background with far greater precision, discovered thousands of exoplanets and surveyed immense portions of the observable universe. What has advanced much less is our ability to explain why the universe has the underlying structure it does. We still do not know the microscopic identity of dark matter or the natur...