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I found this fascinating story The Fundamental Constants Behind Our Universe at medium.com's "Starts with a Bang" column. Ethan Siegel posits:
But the Universe itself experiences continual growth, constant change, and new experiences all the time, and it does so spontaneously.
And yet, the better we understand our Universe — what the laws are that govern it, what particles inhabit it, and what it looked/behaved like farther and farther back in the distant past — the more inevitable it appears that it would look just as it appears.
[...] We’d like to describe our Universe as simply as possible; one of the goals of science is to describe nature in the simplest terms possible, but no simpler. How many of these does it take, as far as we understand our Universe today, to completely describe the particles, interactions, and laws of our Universe?
The answer? "Quite a few, surprisingly: 26, at the very least." He then goes on to explore what these are and how they are computed.
Sadly, we don't know enough to be able to predict everything. As the article notes, there remain problems with explaining CP violations, matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe, cosmic inflation, and what dark matter actually is.
Separately, but related: many years ago I came upon a site that provided interactive exploration of the scale of things in the universe from Planck length on up to the the visible universe. (And, no, it was not powersof10.com) I have a niece who is curious about such things and I would love to share such a site with her. Sadly, I can no longer locate a link. Any suggestions?
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday February 08 2015, @04:00PM
CERNLIB is a colossal FORTRAN library along with a bunch of executables such as PATCHY, is a kinda sorta cross-platform clone of IBM's JCL.
Every law of physics other than general relativity - gravity, loosely speaking - is in CERNLIB somewhere, yet despite having spent decades wandering its Gordian labyrinth, I have yet to actually find any.
I spent seven weeks coming to grips with CERNLIB in the Summer of '93, when I scored a DEO grant to go to St. Genis (the French side of CERN) to do some of the data analysis for UCSC's Clem Heusch' search for non-conservation of Lepton number (I'll explain that later - I'm tired).
Then four days to write my actual FORTRAN source, in the form of a single PATCHY patch, then three days to crunch my numbers.
I had all the graduate students - I was still an undergrad - and postdocs look at my source. They were all completely floored by its pristine clarity.
"The reason Physics software is so difficult," I asserted angrily, "IS THAT YOU PHYSICISTS MAKE IT DIFFICULT!"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday February 08 2015, @11:00PM
"Every Law of Physics Other Than General Relativity" is commonly known as the Standard Model.
That's what TFA is about; CERNLIB numerically models reality, starting in part with all those fundamental constants - speed of light, charge and mass of the electron &c.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @10:00AM
As
Modpoints --> morpinoins.