The anthropic cosmological principle - John D Barrow

This book investigates the history of philosophic thought concerning the question of design and mankind's place in the universe. The modern collection of ideas known as the "anthropic cosmological principle" emerges historically as the latest manifestation of such ideas, and asserts that there is a deep connection between intelligent life and the physical universe. A thorough investigation of its many facets takes the reader on an eclectic study of many scientific disciplines and presents a revealing picture of the structure of the physical world solely in terms of its invariant physical constants.;The book sets out to show that there is a connection between the vastness of the universe and the existence of life within it on a small planet on the outskirts of the Milky Way. The universe needs to be billions of light years in extent in order to support just one lonely outpost of life, and the evolution of life has only been possible because of a number of seeming coincidences in the way the world is fashioned.;Although much of the book is technical in character, it will have a wide interdisciplinary appeal to historians, philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and evolutionists, as well as to physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists.