The Life of the Cosmos

The Life of the Cosmos, published in 1997, is the book in which Smolin first developed at length the hypothesis of cosmological natural selection. The central argument is that the apparent fine-tuning of physical constants — the fact that the constants take values exquisitely compatible with the formation of stars, atoms, chemistry, and life — is not an accident requiring anthropic explanation, nor evidence of design, nor a selection effect of an undifferentiated multiverse. It is the product of a specific evolutionary process operating across generations of universes. Universes reproduce through black holes; offspring universes inherit constants that are slight variations of their parents' constants; universes whose constants favor black hole production come to dominate the population; and the constants that favor black hole production happen, as a predictable side effect, to favor complexity. The book provides the framework that Chapter 2 of the Smolin-AI volume uses to give the river of intelligence its cosmological grounding.