[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714228 (249 Comments)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41847656 (79 Comments)
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41760006 (40 Comments)
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36784319 (1 Comment)
Needless to say, this result is not considered credible by the scientific community. It's borderline crackpot territory if you ask me.
I wonder which number this matches, since we’ve repeatedly measured 2 different values and we can’t figure out why they disagree. As much as this is currently non-peer reviewed ideas that probably won’t lead anywhere (as with most news articles about new research), radical ideas like this are probably what is needed to get to the truth of the Hubble tension and other paradoxes in cosmology.
It was probably a coincidence, but now there's another model with changing constants. I'd love to see where this goes.
This does not mean anything, at all.
Or it’s just humans project meaning into a meaningless universe.
Even among professional physicists, a surprisingly large number of them do not have clear ideas about the meanings of the fundamental constants and of the fundamental units of measurement. The reason is that the subject of metrology, even if it is the fundament of physics, is almost never treated correctly in physics textbooks, if it is mentioned at all.
Ignoring the extra constants that might be needed in the theory of nuclear strong and weak forces, and also the extra constants that may be needed in certain variants of Einstein's theory of gravitation (e.g. "the cosmological constant"), in the physics that is encountered by the majority of people there are only 2 fundamental constants, which determine the strength of the electromagnetic interaction and the strength of the gravitational interaction, i.e. the constant of Coulomb's law of electric attraction and the Newtonian constant of gravitation.
None of these 2 constants can be claimed to be particularly close to 1, even when expressed in natural units, much less when arbitrary units are used. These 2 constants can be expressed in several equivalent ways, but none of the different values obtained thus has any unexpected values.
For example, a constant that is equivalent with Coulomb's constant is the so-called "fine structure constant" a.k.a. Sommerfeld's constant, about which a huge number of aberrant research papers have been written by people who did not know what it means. The "fine structure constant" is the speed of a particle with unit charge that revolves around a fixed particle with unit charge, when having unit angular momentum (in natural units). That speed is determined by the equality between the electric attraction force and the inertial centrifugal force, so it is a measure for the strength of the electric force and it is inversely proportional with the constant from Coulomb's law.
The poor handling of metrology in modern physics textbooks is in contrast with classic masterpieces, like Maxwell's "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism", which started with a good description of how physical quantities are measured and how systems of fundamental units of measurement are chosen, because without such a solid base all the following theory can be flawed, as it frequently happens in some modern theoretical research papers, where bogus numbers are computed.
In the SI system of units, besides the 2 constants of Newton and Coulomb there are a few other "fundamental constants", which are fake fundamental constants, because they are some exact numbers, chosen by convention instead of being measured experimentally, which are chosen is such a way so that the legal units, like meter, second, kilogram, have values approximately equal with the values corresponding to their old historical definitions.
If you pick other units, you can make the constants 1. You don't really need to 'recalculate' something for that.
And while this can sometimes be useful to reframe your thoughts and even lead to new insights it doesn't really have an inherent meaning.
What could that possibly mean?
There's a few ways of doing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
Alternatively, and more likely, it's based on the "relative" strengths of the different forces, where ratios of about 10^40 do tend to turn up.
For example, the ratio of electric force versus gravitational attractive forces for a proton and an electron is 2.3 x 10^39 which is close.
PS: A fun thing to numerological coincidence to consider is that 2^128 is about 3.4 * 10^38, which is weirdly close. It's almost like gravity is "rounding error" on a universe simulator made with 128-bit CPUs. Similarly, 2^256 is close to the Eddington number of ~10^80, which is the estimated number of particles in the Universe...
I mean that literally doesn't mean anything? It literally depends on the units you choose to use?
We're like a goldfish in a bowl. So what can you do except browsing xkcd and be filled with that wonder:
Give or take some orders of magnitude. It is enough to sit in awe
Do you mean geocentric?
> It's way too convenient that entire space evolved from a single point long time ago.
It didn't evolve from a single point.
Also why do we accept doppler shifts as proof if we can't prove the time is uniform in space.
i used to think it was cringe and maybe it is, but many normies love that show and watching it with them when they find it funny is actually endearing.
i prefer the higher quality of modern shows that have richer narratives and are more immersive?
but sitcoms for me have a sentimental value. my dad would come home tired after work and my parents would watch everybody loves raymond, and before sleep me and my dad would watch fresh prince of bel air and cosby show.
big bang is the one of the last shows before my parents moved on to forming a youtube vlogs addiction.
Until we get radically new data, I'll consider the universe ageless. This is the most elegant solution anyway.
Not any reputable ones. The consensus on the estimated age of the universe has shifted only slightly in the last several decades.
How could it start from absolutely nothing?
Since Hubble launched there's been a near complete consensus on the bounds that were radically reduced down from before. Perhaps you were born in the seventies or earlier? Well before CMB studies and the Hubble telescope launched.
There's just been a ton of science trying to reconcile the difference in the upper and lower bounds that are far closer than they were before. But it's a few billion years, not doubling or halving.
For the second part, it's completely fine to dismiss the first question as irrelevant as "what is 'it' in 'it rains '". That is, language artifact are not evidence of ontological correspondance in actual things happening. So, "we", "being", and "me" can be regarded as illusions. The illusion itself actually happen, but it's more straight forward interpretion is generally misguiding.
The first approach on the other hand can lead to dismiss consciousness as relevant tool to reach some absolute substance which is postulated as ultimate reality. That is, there is some "being", and "I" and "we", just as there are actual ideal spheres in existence in a platonic sense.
Both don't give much credits to the most trivial intuitive interpretation of phenomena, but they kind of point to very different directions.
And illusion implies that something exits, where the illusion can be casted and experimented.