From quarks to life

I recently attended a workshop in Madrid with the title “Light quark masses and hadron physics and the sub-title “(from quarks to life)”. The sub-title hinted at a good portion of the agenda of the workshop, which was the impact of quark masses on anthropic reasoning. This comes about because if the light quark masses were slightly different, nuclei and atoms would not exist. This is a topic that I have been interested in, both early on with Dave Seckel and Steve Barr and recently with Thibault Damour. I talked on my work on heavy nuclei and the resulting anthropic constraints. You can find my talk and the others on the conference web page. This is getting to be almost a respectable subject.

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