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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

What I tried to explain is that this is not really about other universes. The logic applies even if our universe is the only one. It is about the amount of seemingly arbitrary assumptions we have to make for the theory to explain our universe.

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But we end up having to make other arbitrary assumptions about what happened at the very beginning of the big bang or about multiverses that we have no scientific justification in making. Calling the observed physical constants 'arbitrary' is a very mathemetician-like move. It is true that they are free variables in the sense that they cannot currently be derived--mathematical models of the universe must include these constants as hard-coded values. But the word arbitrary implies that they could have been something else, and we really don't have justification for that.

We write the modeling program and somewhere we write

  FINE_STRUCTURE_CONSTANT=1/137;

It is very tempting to instead write

  ./my_universe.sh --fst=0.007 ...

The code does the same thing, but as far as we know that constant is as invariable and intrinsic to what it means to be a universe as PI is to what it means to be a circle.

It is fun to think about but it can't produce scientific results. It's epicycles, coming up with more complicated stories that over-fit for a singular observation.

> But the word arbitrary implies that they could have been something else, and we really don't have justification for that.

Well, we’re looking for a reasoning that would support that they couldn’t have been something else, and the article is about one way of coming closer to that.

There are really only two possibilities: Either there’s a reason why they are what they are, then we want to find that reason, or there is no reason, then in other words they are arbitrary.

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