SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Interesting) by gnuman on Sunday February 08 2015, @05:41PM
This is quite premature to start counting "fundamental constants" when we have no idea how they really fit together. The standard model may not be fundamental at all. AFAIK, Standard Model is just a periodic table of subatomic particles. To use it as some sort of counting experiment is no better than ancient Greeks assuming that everything is composed of fire, water, earth and air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element [wikipedia.org]
Before nuclear physics, the period table was fundamental. Physics was complete! Furthermore, how certain are we that some of these "constants" aren't actually changing? Is h fixed for all time and space?
First we have to figure out how things work before we start counting any constants. Imagine an AI counting fundamental constants in its computer universe. What would it find? Would it be able to determine that there is only 2 - one and zero and only 1 fundamental operation, (eg. NOR gate)? We are an AI in some quantum-like computer. Well... so far we haven't seen far enough or small enough to scratch the surface. OK, we scuffed the surface a little.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @05:08AM
> AFAIK, Standard Model is just a periodic table of subatomic particles.
It's the model of how those subatomic particles interact as well. If you have a list of all particles and a model of how they interact, you have a model of the universe. You just need a very very big computer to calculate the probability of this or that happening.