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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

If it wasn't the case then matter wouldn't be stable.

An interesting early theory of gravity was: "What if opposite charges attract slight more strongly than identical charges repel each other?"

If you tally up the forces, the difference is a residual attraction that can model gravity. It was rejected on various experimental and theoretical grounds, but it goes to show that if things don't cancel out exactly then the result can still leave a universe that would appear normal to us.

Agreed (well, assuming the delta is more than a small fraction of a percent or whatever). But this is begging the question. If they are really independent then the vast, overwhelming fraction of all possible universes simply wouldn't have matter. Ours does have matter, so it makes our universe exceedingly unlikely. I find it far more parsimonious to assume they are connected by an undiscovered (and perhaps never to be discovered) mechanism.

Some lean on the multiverse and the anthropic principle to explain it, but that is far less parsimonious.

Also note that the proton is not an elementary particle so it is really a question of "are the various quarks really 1/3, 2/3 of an electron charge".

Crackpots have found thousands of formula that try to explain the ratio of the proton to electron mass but there is no expectation that there is a simple relationship between those masses since the proton mass is the sum of all sorts of terms.

Crackpots are downstream of the "physics community" awarding cultural cachet to certain types of questions -- those with affordances they don't necessarily "deserve"-- but not others.

(I use quotes because those are emergent concepts)

Same as "hacker community" deciding that AI is worth FOMO'ing about

Well, I'm not sure I believe that "hierarchy problems" in HEP are real, but I do think the nature of the neutrino mass is interesting (we know it has a mass so it is a something and not a nothing) as is the nature of dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the non-observation of proton decay. That article has nothing to say about non-accelerator "big science" in HEP such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande

which targets many of those questions.

As for the "hacker community" I think AI is really controversial. I think other people find the endless spam of slop articles about AI more offensive than I do. It's obvious that these are struggling to make it off the "new/" page. The ones that offend me are the wanna-be celebrity software managers [1] who think we care what they think about delivering software that almost works.

[1] sorry, I liked DHH's industry-changing vision behind Ruby-on-Rails, but his pronunciations about software management were always trash. You might make the case that Graham worked with a lot of startups so his essays might have had some transferable experience but they didn't. Atwood and Spolsky, likewise. Carmack is the one exception, he's a genius

Carmack is the Midwestern middle middle-class (culturally) dropout amongst them. Classic

Is that actually true, if the charges differed at the 12th decimal place only? That’s non-obvious to me.

Yes because matter would have a residual charge that would massively overpower gravity even at that small a discrepancy.

To be devil's advocate maybe there is a surplus deficit of 1-part-in-10^12 in electrons relative to protons.

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