The Beer-Centric Universe

It's no secret that I spend way too much time thinking about beer.

Family vacation?  Sure, if it involves a brewery tour.  Secret Santa time?  Six-pack, and done!  A little light reading?  Check this out:

Quality father-daughter time.

I love making beer, and drinking beer.  And I love learning about beer. And as I've learned more about beer, I've come to a single and awe-inspiring conclusion:

Everything in this universe can be explained by beer.

Politics?  Tastes great!  Less filling!

Anthropolgy?  Hunter-gatherer societies gave way to grain-based agriculture.  To make beer.

But I've recently started to realize that this is not just my own bizarre beer-centric obsession.  Beer is at the very heart of our universe.  Without beer, none of this could exist.

Let me explain.

This idea came to me while reading a Stephen Hawking book.  No, really.  In it, Hawking (I call him "Steve") was explaining the theory of the multiverse, and used the example of the Anthropic principle.

Basically (if I understood it right, and that's one BIG if), the Anthropic principle reasons that we, as intelligent beings, can observe the universe because the universe displays the correct age, the exact right physical values and laws, a planet with just the right climate and physical conditions for our species to emerge through evolution and eventually observe and seek to understand the universe around us.  Since, according to quantum theory, the observer changes the outcome of the observed, our ability to observe the universe has helped create the universe which we observe.  One version of this thought, dubbed the Strong Anthropic Principle, says this is all part of the "design" of the universe; that the Universe came into being in order to develop intelligent life.

The more accepted (at least by cosmologists, and other people who generally aren't crazy) variant of the Strong Anthropic is the creatively titled Weak Anthropic, which states that, yes, this universe is exactly the right kind of universe for our observation, which makes sense because any other universe within the infinite multiverse would be incapable of being observed because intelligent observers (like us) would be impossible.

In other words, we observe a universe that seems just right for us, not because that's how some supreme being created it, but because if it was any other way, we wouldn't be here to observe it.

Ok, pure, totally circular logic, but at least it's consistent circular logic.  It makes sense.

And the same is true of beer.

Beer has been important, even essential, to human civilization from its very inception.  Indeed, civilization would have been impossible, and according to some scholars, would never have arisen, without beer.

Let that soak in.

Yes, other drinks, like wine and coffee and tea, have helped civilization make leaps forward in certain areas, but beer predates all of them.  Indeed, recorded history began because someone wanted to record his homebrew recipes.

This makes perfect sense.

Beer provided a way of storing grains in more compact form.  Their additional benefits (spoiler: it's the alcohol) made them more popular, therefore more valuable, which led to commerce. And they were safe to drink, even when water was dodgy and untrustworthy (like when people started building cities).

As a homebrewer, I know at least the basics of what makes beer beer, and that encompasses biology, chemistry and physics, starting with the enzymes in the grains that convert the starches into simple sugars, which requires both water and heat in very specific quantities.  From that point, the yeast, generally one of two specific species of Saccharomyces, take over to process the sugar.  The yeast consume the sugar (C12H22O11) into carbon dioxide (CO2) and ethanol (C2H6O), resulting in a carbonated alcoholic beverage.

Science!

Take all that in for a moment.  In fact, if you skimmed that last paragraph, read it again.  This is important.

We happen, by total chance, to live in a universe where an enzyme in a seed is released under specific circumstances that converts complex carbohydrates into simple sugars.  We live in a universe where microscopic fungi consume the sugar and convert that sugar into alcohol, which is a weirdly specific and mind-bogglingly useful thing for a micro-organism to do.  And we live in a universe where the chemical properties of alcohol on our bodies are not so deadly as to preclude their consumption, but rather we note instead certain no-entirely-unpleasant after-affects.  In addition, we live in a universe where the alpha acids in hop resin have an anti-microbial effect that keep harmful bacteria at bay, but allows the yeast to grow unmolested.  If any one of these traits of our universe were different, it would mean one thing: no beer.

And no beer would mean:

No agriculture.  No safe drinking supply.  No cities.  No division of labor.  No schools.  No medicine  (for beer was one of the first effective medicines ever used, and its sister drink, whiskey, was another).  No concentration of people in order to bring diverse ideas into a single world-view.  No development of early scientific principles.  No science.  No observation.

And since we live in our observed universe, it must be a universe that supports beer.  The observer cannot be separated from the observed because our very act of observation helps define what we observe.  Our universe cannot be observed without beer, thus our universe cannot exist in the absence of beer.

 It is only because we live in a universe with beer, that we can observe the universe around us...while drinking a beer.