The fact that these constants evidently could have had any value but had to have the precise values that they do if a life-sustaining universe would be possible is a mystery that has baffled scientists for over a century.
Richard Feynman spoke about this in 1985. He picks out just one constant, called the coupling constant - which is related to the force between two bodies subject to gravitational or electrostatic attraction or repulsion - and marvels at its seeming randomness:
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant…It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won’t recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.)Feder and Zimmer add,
Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.
You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.” We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
Feynman’s great mystery of the constants is: How could 25 seemingly arbitrary numbers truly be fundamental? And if they aren’t fundamental, how could physicists possibly find a deeper theory that would explain the values of the constants?Here I have a quibble. I think it's not quite correct to word this the way the authors did. To say that scientists know that the constants "are fine-tuned in order to bring about a complex, ordered, and structured universe" seems to assume that creation of a universe like ours is the reason the constants are fine-tuned. I think there are probably a lot of scientists who would deny that the constants were purposefully selected.
Notice that the mystery of the constants has absolutely nothing to do with fine-tuning, but is rather an intrinsic mystery that lies at the heart of physicists’ dream of discovering the most fundamental reality of the universe.
Given this conceptual backdrop, we can see how the discovery of fine-tuning is scientific knowledge — it provides a significant clue about the constants. We now know that the constants aren’t truly arbitrary but are fine-tuned in order to bring about a complex, ordered, and structured universe.
It might be better to say that the fine-tuning of the constants, however it came about, is such that a life-permitting universe is possible. At any rate, Feder and Zimmer then argue that intelligent agency is the best explanation for this phenomenon: We can now ask: What does the scientific discovery of fine-tuning tell us about the cause of the constants?
Using the definition of intelligence as the ability to select one option from among many for the purpose of achieving a particular objective, the straightforward conclusion is that constants were selected by an intelligent cause for the purpose of bringing about a universe with atoms, molecules, planets, life, stars, and galaxies.The authors go on, then, to discuss weaknesses and strengths of this version of the fine-tuning argument for intelligent design of the universe. Whether one finds their last version more compelling than the elimination formulation or the version based on probabilities, it seems to me that taken together the three of them add up to a very powerful argument for the conclusion that the universe is intelligently engineered and that it's therefore much more likely that there's an enormously capable Mind behind it all than that it's just an incredibly fortuitous fluke of nature.
