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tasty_freezetoday at 1:58 AM1 replyview on HN

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.


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PaulHouletoday at 3:23 AM

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.

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