Ask Ethan: Does the multiverse clarify our basic constants? | by Ethan Siegel | Begins With A Bang! | Mar, 2025

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We usually conceive of our Universe as having emerged from a previous interval of cosmic inflation, with our Large Bang occurring the place one area of inflating house ceased inflating and transitioned to being dominated by matter and radiation. Nevertheless, in different areas, inflation continues indefinitely, giving rise to different child (or bubble) universes, probably with very totally different properties and situations from our personal. (Credit score: Kavli IMPU)

There are some 26 basic constants in nature, and their values allow our Universe to exist because it does. However the place do they arrive from?

Right here in our Universe, there are three main properties which have led to it unfolding because it has:

  • the legal guidelines of physics that govern all of nature,
  • the preliminary situations that our Universe started with,
  • and the values of the elemental constants that apply to the particles, fields, and forces in our Universe.

Over time, this has led to our fashionable cosmos: stuffed with atoms, stars, planets, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and a grand cosmic net. On a few of these planets, life has arisen, with at the very least one occasion of clever, technologically superior life arising on a planet recognized very nicely to us: Earth.

However what if issues had been just a bit totally different? Maybe, even with the identical legal guidelines of nature and really comparable preliminary situations, a model of our personal Universe that possessed totally different basic constants may have turned out vastly in a different way than our personal. So why does our Universe have basic constants with the values that they do? That’s what Pierre Louw desires to know, following up on…