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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

I know you’re joking around but does the universe seem hacked together to you?

I feel like it’s incredibly elegant. All these low level rules are able to create such complex structures with beautiful order to it.

It’s so orderly, we can play things backwards billions of years. We can look back to how things were just a fraction of a second after this version of the universe began.

It’s astonishing.

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But can we explain just what exactly quantum mechanics is?

It's too bad we'll almost certainly never be able to answer the meta question of how or why we ended up with the rules we did.

These questions are more metaphysics than science.

I, personally, am partial to the idea that the anthropic principle has a pretty big role to play, at least in terms of the fundamental constants.

That's why I didn't say metaphysics specifically. I really mean the scientific answer to the question rather than a philosophical one. How did we end up with bosons, gluons, etc as opposed to anything else? Maybe it was totally random. A combo of it being random, the anthropic principle being true, and the possibility that the big bang was actually proceeded by the collapse of $current_universe - 1 due to heat death seems plausible. It could turn out we're actually on universe number 1 trillion and this was the first one where the randomness worked out where it'd support life. Or maybe it's even the second. We'd never be able to figure it out either way.

Maybe. The fact that a treatment of particle physics based on Symmetry groups works so well is rather odd, but equally why should it be that way? Elegance is subjective, mathematical elegance even more so.

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