Well-tuned Fundamental Constants in a Highly Strange Universe

'2012_11_260021' photo (c) 2012, Gwydion M. Williams - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/Physicists are apparently having trouble explaining to themselves (much less the rest of us) what the Higgs Boson, for the theory of which two physicists were recently awarded the Nobel Prize, actually means.

“One possibility has been brought up that even physicists don’t like to think about. Maybe the universe is even stranger than they think. Like, so strange that even post-Standard Model models can’t account for it. Some physicists are starting to question whether or not our universe is natural. This cuts to the heart of why our reality has the features that it does: that is, full of quarks and electricity and a particular speed of light.

This problem, the naturalness or unnaturalness of our universe, can be likened to a weird thought experiment. Suppose you walk into a room and find a pencil balanced perfectly vertical on its sharp tip. That would be a fairly unnatural state for the pencil to be in because any small deviation would have caused it to fall down. This is how physicists have found the universe: a bunch of rather well-tuned fundamental constants have been discovered that produce the reality that we see.”

No comment. You probably know what this conundrum indicates to me, anyway, given my presuppositions.

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