Fine tuning specifics: explaining cosmic constants (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 08, 2016, 00:38 (3183 days ago) @ David Turell

The universe seems fine-tuned. Why are those constants constant, the value they are for seemingly no good reason or are they?:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/are-the-constants-of-physics-constant/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20160307-"Paul Dirac, wondered in a Nature paper whether the constants were indeed constant if one were to look at the entire history of the cosmos. Measurements on earth are useful but it is a tiny blue dot in the vast universe. What Dirac asked decades ago is what physicists continue to ask today. Is it a constant everywhere in the universe? Why is it a constant? How constant? The question lingered even as the decades rolled on. “The most exact value at present for the ratio of proton to electron mass is 1836.12 +/-0.05,” wrote Friedrich Lenz in a 1951 Physical Review Letters paper. “It may be of interest to note that this number coincides with 6pi^2=1836.12.” That was the entire paper.-*** -"The universe went through three broad phases - the initial radiation dominated phase soon after the Big Bang, a long matter dominated phase, and then a very long dark energy dominated phase that began six billion years ago. One hypothesis is that the mass ratio might have varied only in transitions between the phases. The actual value of the mass ratio (1836.15267389) is not of as much a concern as the uncertainty around its stature as a constant. -***-"The mass ratio, they write, varies less than 0.0005 percent, not enough to call it a change. This is based on telescope observations going as far as 12.4 billion years back in time when the universe was only 10 percent of its current age.-***-"The Vrije Universiteit group is one of a handful of teams in the world that has been on the case of the proton-electron mass ratio for over a decade. -***-"They have even used the Hubble Space Telescope to look at white dwarf stars to see if environments with 10,000 times more gravity than earth would alter the mass ratio.-"And...nada. 'Null result' is one of the most common phrases in their papers. Which is good. Even a small change of a few percent in the value of the ratio would mean a different universe. A smaller mass ratio could mean a wimpier proton, and possibly a weaker pull for the electrons orbiting the nucleus, leading to different kind of matter.-***- "Therein lies the quandary which makes the VU team's research feel like it is equal parts futile and important. No theory in physics can explain the constant mass ratio, the steadfast shepherd of science. It just is, *shrug*."-Comment: The fine-tuning constants are so far constant. By looking back into the past with the Hubble telescope and other new ones to come they are shown not to change during the history of the universe's evolution. Maybe they were planned that way!