I watched a show on String Theory and M Theory recently. It said this:

"Scientists have found that there are about 20 numbers. Twenty fundamental constants of nature, that give the universe the characteristics we see today. These are numbers like how much an electron weighs, the strength of gravity, the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak forces."

What are the rest of these numbers?

26, actually:

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 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

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

John Baez is a good source on such stuff btw. Deep (and I mean really) yet readable.

thanx :D

Another source, I think somewhat more frowned upon by the more rigid crowd, but one that I find quite illuminating at times is John. D. Barrow:

http://www.hypography.com/article.cfm?id=32630

Totally cool book, and you might wish to look at others by him. Deep into math and cosmology, and the only person I know who took the trouble of putting stuff into simple tables, so any fool can see that electromagnetism only works in 3 dimensions (or one, but that's useless).

Pretty good at explaining stuff, in short, and is the funniest quoter in the business. I sometimes really don't know where he gets them from, and I'm a collector of quotes myself.... ;)

The fundamental constants of nature:

greed
selfishness
hostility
hate
war
death
taxes
scams
and the biggest one of all has to be: bullshit.


Lava

Nothing reincarnation won't cure, my friend.

It hasnt cured it yet...

Well, keep trying... ;)

BTW, let's not confuse constants with fundamentals.

Positive and negative are fundamentals. One man's luck is another's nightmare.
But since the universe is suspected to be one thing, both by mystics and scientists, we're doing it quite literally to ourselves, any which way you look at it, so complaining does not really help, or change things.

Maybe only a bit of fairness, and giving the other guy a decent break could remedy that. Economists should pick up a book about zero sum games, and all that. Even Johnny von Neumann had a fair economy worked out, but they are still scratching their heads over that. Economists' math is generally very poor, or they'd be econometrists.

Pays better, too.