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, Informative) by VLM on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:58PM
electromagnetic + weak, not + strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction [wikipedia.org]
From my engineering background I always had a (probably inaccurate) gut-level feeling its like super critical water steam stables. Above a certain temp/pressure there is no dividing line between liquid and gas, and above a certain energy level no dividing line between weak + electromagnetic.
Theres a huge fixation on unified descriptions, if you think about the economic impact of electromagnetism, its pretty motivational. Then again I can't think of any economic activity related to electroweak unification, so why there is a belief that a GUT would have any practical engineering results is illogical.
If you'd like to see a far out interpretation of the FSC go searching for Noyes work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-string_physics [wikipedia.org]
Also the FSC wikipedia has innumerable numerological results matching the experimental result, so all you gotta find in a theory (assuming its not random constant) is a formula that when plug and chugged happens to fit the form of the numerological discovery (I like that one involving natural logs and exponents of 137)