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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) by boristhespider on Monday February 09 2015, @10:15PM
If there's something that I didn't make clear - which wouldn't at all surprise me - then feel free to ask someone to elaborate (or rephrase, or condense) and if it's not me there are a couple of other posters on here who are familiar with relatively high-level physics. I'd be genuinely happy to try and rephrase. I've commented before that finding a level to pitch at is pretty tough.
I'm also open about the fact that I'm a cosmologist first and a gravitational theorist second; I'm not, and nor have I ever pretended to be, a particle physicist, merely someone who probably has a bit more familiarity with the field than many others on here.