Hmmm! What with the financial meltdown, environmental degradation, the specter of peak oil and all the rest of it, there are fields of endeavor where we're still making progress, or trying to. Take astrophysics, for example. It turns out that the fine structure constant might not be a constant after all. Isn't that gnarly?

Okay, okay, I'll explain. The fine structure constant is what you get when you take the fundamental unit of electric charge (the charge on the electron), the fundamental unit of quantum size (the proportion of a photon's energy to its wavelength, aka Planck's constant), and the fundamental speed limit of the universe (the speed of light in a vacuum), then swizzle them all together in a single equation. The interesting thing is that all the units of measurement cancel each other out and leave behind... just... a number. Not a number of anything, mind you, just a plain, dimensionless number: 1÷137.036. This means it doesn't matter if you measure the speed of light, for example, in kilometers per second, furlongs per fortnight, or any other unit of length per J. Random unit of time: every unit on top of the fraction gets cancelled by an equivalent unit on the bottom of the fraction, and vice versa. The resulting number is a so-called coupling constant that precisely characterizes the relative strength or weakness of the forces that bind the universe together, or blow it apart, or whatever it is they do. Neat, huh?

Except it looks like the dang thing actually might not be a constant after all. If recent measurements are correct, the fine structure constant might be different in different areas of space and/or time. Most people won't care, but to a physicist, cosmologist, and/or interested layman like yours truly, the implications are more than slightly mind-blowing. For one thing, the physicists tell us that a difference of 4% or so in the fine structure constant is the difference between a universe in which matter, and therefore life, as we know it, can exist, and one where they can't. Given that fact, those same physicists have long wondered just how the heck the universe could be so fine-tuned that there are actually people living inside it. How did we get so lucky? More and more, it's starting to look like the same reason why no one's unlucky enough to live unprotected at the bottom of the ocean, or the heart of the sun, or in the vacuum of interstellar space: because anyone who finds themself in that position immediately stops living. In other words, the universe looks like it was made for us because we're inhabiting the one part of it where we could live at all. What we call the observable universe, with its stars, galaxies, planets, seahorses, Greek ruins, and so on, is looking more and more like just a little local pocket of an unimaginably greater one in most of which the existence of not only life as we understand it but matter itself is flat-out impossible. Ouch. Feel your mind expanding yet?