Anthropics of aluminum-26 decay and biological homochirality

Abstract

Results of recent experiment reinstate feasibility to the hypothesis that biomolecular homochirality originates from beta decay. Coupled with hints that this process occurred extraterrestrially suggests aluminum-26 as the most likely source. If true, then its appropriateness is highly dependent on the half-life and energy of this decay. Demanding that this mechanism hold places new constraints on the anthropically allowed range for multiple parameters, including the electron mass, difference between up and down quark masses, the fine structure constant, and the electroweak scale. These new constraints on particle masses are tighter than those previously found. However, one edge of the allowed region is nearly degenerate with an existing bound, which, using what is termed here as 'the principle of noncoincident peril', is argued to be a strong indicator that the fine structure constant must be an environmental parameter in the multiverse.

The Degree of Fine-Tuning in our Universe -- and Others

“…At the more fundamental level, nuclei themselves must be stable (Section 2). In addition, if habitable planets require particular nuclear structures, such as iron being the most stable nucleus and/or particular types of radioactivity, then even tighter constraints on the fundamental parameters (e.g, α) can be derived [462,463].…”

“…These studies include constraints on the cosmological constant, starting with the original work of Weinberg [545], which has subsequently been generalized to include variations of additional parameters [16,226,310,363,383,270,423,537]. Additional studies have presented anthropic arguments for the energy scale of electroweak symmetry breaking [21,54,302], big bang nucleosynthesis [370], stellar nucleosynthesis including the triple-alpha resonance [302,362,380], the parameters of aluminum-26 decay [463], the mass of the proton [415], the masses of neutrinos [512], the finite age of the universe [142], and for the existence of three generations in the Standard Model [237,291,467].…”