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The Fundamental Constants Behind our Universe

posted by LaminatorX on Sunday February 08 2015, @03:17PM   
from the fine-structure dept.

martyb writes:

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?

• Re:Fundamental forces not fundamental.. (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:59PM

  by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday February 08 2015, @06:59PM (#142519) Journal

  I recall watching a NOVA program some time ago that talked about the fundamental forces. The magnetic force and electricity are descended from the same, electromagnetic force that hasn't completely split apart at our energy level (maybe it has near absolute zero). At higher energies they interact as one force. The predictions were that at still higher energies, it would combine with the Strong(?) nuclear force, leaving us with the gravity, the weak nuclear force, and some strong-electromagnetic force. Has this theory been dismissed?

  The electromagnetic force is unified with the weak force to the electroweak force. That theory has not been dismissed. I'm no particle physicist, so I cannot say for sure, but I guess the fine structure constant is still a parameter (you can probably replace the parameter set with another one not directly containing alpha, but that would not save you any constant).

  This constant appears to not even be constant

  The function alpha(E) contains a constant which equals alpha(0). That's like the function f(x) = x+b contains the constant b, and f(0)=b. So f is not a constant, but the value of f(0) is a constant, namely b.

  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

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