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Comment by MauranKilom | Hacker News Reader

> About 18 particles

> About 25 numbers

Excellent science here!

Obviously this won't help you find the particles but this seriously isn't far off capturing how shocking symmetry groups are as a tool for building theories in particle physics. The fact that you can reduce so much physics down to some invariance is very spooky.

Or just beautiful!

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html

  the mass of the up quark
  the mass of the down quark
  the mass of the charmed quark
  the mass of the strange quark
  the mass of the top quark
  the mass of the bottom quark
  4 numbers for the Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix
  the mass of the electron
  the mass of the electron neutrino
  the mass of the muon
  the mass of the mu neutrino
  the mass of the tau
  the mass of the tau neutrino
  4 numbers for the Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata matrix
  the mass of the Higgs boson
  the expectation value of the Higgs field
  the U(1) coupling constant
  the SU(2) coupling constant
  the strong coupling constant
  the cosmological constant

^—— “How Many Fundamental Constants Are There?” by John Baez

Good to know the speed of light in a vacuum is not a fundamental constant.

Yep, you can just set c=1 and have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units

Apparently, even vacuum is not a fundamental constant.

The bad news is Nature abhors a vacuum. The good news is there's plenty of it.

You can't contradict this. Nature is perfect.

I take this to be an acknowledgement that we don't know everything.

I.e.,

    "These are the only ones of which the news has come to Haaahrvard,
    And there may be many others but they haven't been discohhhvered."

Observation is part of science, but we're also limited by it. There's a lot of deeper workings that we just can't get at yet, maybe ever.

Sounds like my tax declaration... where they ask for the number of my children.

Improved the first. The second is ok.

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