Scientists at Queen Mary University of London have identified a fresh constraint on the basic numbers that shape the universe. Physicist Kostya Trachenko examined how those numbers control the thickness of liquids. Cells depend on liquids for nearly every function. Molecules must reach reaction sites, waste must leave, and chemical exchanges must continue without interruption. Viscosity decides how freely those movements occur. Water pours easily because its viscosity stays low. Honey moves more slowly, while tar barely moves at all.
Trachenko’s study is somewhat astounding, as it indicates that the same parameters that determine electron charge and the Planck constant also limit how free-flowing any liquid can be. A few percent change in either of those values would cause a liquid to become so viscous that cells would simply stop transporting nutrients, or so thin that all the carefully controlled resistance required for chemical reactions to occur in an orderly manner would vanish. In any case, a living cell’s internal flow would become chaotic. Trachenko believes that if water began to flow like tar, life as we know it would cease to exist, and this is true whether life used water or another solvent.
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These same fundamental constants also play an important part in how stars forge carbon, oxygen, and other heavy elements in their cores, which are then converted into the raw material for living creatures. Trachenko’s work adds another condition to the mix: a universe may be able to make all of the atoms it requires while producing liquids that are so viscous and uncooperative that cell chemistry cannot begin. That is, conditions conducive to liquid-based life were established long before the first cells appeared, and they have remained constant since the universe’s inception.
A later study by the same team looked more closely at blood, which is a bit more complicated than pure water, with red cells clumping together and then separating as the flow speed changes, for example. Despite all of that extra cellular equipment, the overall viscosity of blood remains rather near to the theoretical minimum established by the fundamental constants. When you look at the interactions at the tiny gaps between those cells, you can see that there are distances at which both the effects of molecules and quantum mechanics become relevant, and this is true even when all of the extra biological complexity is factored in.
So we’re left with a significant question: why do the universe’s constants happen to be in a perfect zone where they allow both star chemistry and liquid flow through cells to function together? Trachenko has proposed that a number of distinct requirements may have converged on the same values, similar to how different biological traits can eventually become fixed in a population via various routes, but no one really knows how that would happen or why the constants themselves are so consistent over time. What is evident is that ordinary liquids now provide yet another concrete link between physics rules and the conditions that enable life as we know it to function.
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