Alejandro Jenkins

Alejandro Jenkins
Born 1979
San Jose, Costa Rica
Fields Physicist
Institutions Florida State University
Alma mater California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, University of Costa Rica.

Alejandro Jenkins is a post-doctorate researcher of high energy physics at Florida State University. Dr. Jenkins is a native of Costa Rica. He received degrees from Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology.

His work with Robert Jaffe and Itamar Kimchi on the anthropic principle and the possibility of life in universes with different cosmological constants was featured on the cover of the January 2010 Scientific American. It has better described the relationship between quark mass and development of complex organic compounds.[1]

Research

Quark mass and congeniality to life

The anthropic principle

Main article: Anthropic principle

In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the collective name for several ways of asserting that the observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the life observed in it. The principle was formulated as a response to a series of observations that the laws of nature and its fundamental physical constants remarkably take on values that are consistent with conditions for life as we know it rather than a set of values that would not be consistent with life as observed on Earth. The anthropic principle states that this apparent coincidence is actually a necessity because living observers would not be able to exist, and hence, observe the universe, were these laws and constants not constituted in this way.

The anthropic principle is based on the implicit assumption that life must operate on similar chemistry to our own, which has been criticized for being overly restrictive (sometimes called carbon chauvinism). If the weakest precondition for generic life is simply a sufficiently complex environment to allow reproduction and evolution, then any universe which could provide such complexity (in one form or another) could bring forth life.

Jenkins' contributions

To test this hypothesis, Jaffe, Jenkins and Kimchi used models to "tweak" the values of the quark masses and examined how that would affect the ability of isotopes of carbon to form as well as other factors critical to the formation of organic life on earth. They found that within the various potential "universes" they examined, many had very different qualities from our own, but that none-the-less life could still form. In some cases, where forms of carbon we find in our universe were impossible, different forms of stable carbon were predicted. In such a situation, life would still be possible.[2]

This undercuts a fundamental component of the anthropic principle: that life can only arise under very specific conditions and that the specific structure of our universe is the way it is for the purpose of developing life. Their research suggests that even in universes very different from our own, life would still be possible. Therefore this makes the form of our universe look less "special."

See also

References

  1. ↑ Gilad Perez, A Guided Tour through the Nuclear Landscape, Physics 2,21 (2009) Physical Review D 79, doi:10.1103/Physics.2.21
  2. ↑ Robert L. Jaffe, Alejandro Jenkins, Itamar Kimchi, Quark Masses: an environmental impact statement, Physical Review D 79, 065014 (2009)

External links