Identifying the Coders
Now this is just darned interesting:
The secret of the Universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10^122. Scott Funkhouser of the Military College of South Carolina (called The Citadel) in Charleston has shown how this number — 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 combined1. This ‘coincidence’, he says, is surely significant, hinting at some common principle at work behind the scenes.
How about this? What we've manged 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.