Number Thirteen in a series of 'coincidences' that allow intelligent life to exist. Barrow and Tipler, THE COSMIC ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE.
"Before leaving this topic it is worth recalling that our extrapolition back to the early moments ~-10^-35S rests upon the belief that elementary particle interactions become ASYMPTOTICALLY FREE at high energy. Were that not the case, interaction strengths would grow in complexity as T approached infinity, and the very early universe would resemble an intractable strongly interacting state, not amenable to analysis employing the ideal gas laws (which apply to systems with particle interaction times much shorter than the typical time between interactions). We have already seen that the phenomenon of asymptomatic freedom arises in quantum chromodynamics because of the smearing of colour charge to gluons beats the vacuum polarization effects of virtual quark-antiquark pairs. This only happens if the number of quark flavors arising in nature is less than 17. Since qyarks and leptons appar in a paired generation structure, the number of neutrino species, N(V) must be bounded by half the number of quark flabours, hence, N(V)< 8. As yet there is no understanding of the observed values of N(V). Primordial nucleosynthesis requires N as smaller than or equal to 4 and if we have N(V)~6-8 virtually all the Universe would be burnt to helium during primordial nucleosynthesis and the present Universe would be devoid of hydrogen, water, and life."
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