What are the fundamental constants that govern the properties of our universe?

[Aditya89]

Hey, I read about arbitrary elements sometime ago. Could anybody tell me what affects the values of these? And I also read that some say that the values of these are fine-tuned by the Creator. What is the general take on that?

 

[EL]

Hey, I read about arbitrary elements sometime ago. Could anybody tell me what affects the values of these? And I also read that some say that the values of these are fine-tuned by the Creator. What is the general take on that?

What "Creator"? What arbitrary elements?

 

[Soul Surfer]

You may be thinking of the book by Martin Rees called just six numbers and offshoots of this.

The general properies of the universe are governed by a few constants that determine the relationship between various physical quantities

I wil use martin rees' numbers in the order he gave them in the book but use my own descriptions of them

The first Possibly the most vital is the relative strengths of gravitational and electromagnetic forces which is huge. This allows the universe to be very big because atoms are much smaller than gravitating objects ie you need a very great many atoms to create a significant gravitiational field.

another number defines how small nucleii will be in relation to the electon cloud. this is very finely balanced to allow a reasonable number of stable atoms to form and transmute into each other via interactions at high temperatures and pressures but not too many or too few too fast or too slow. This allows stars and all the materials the we encounter in our lives to form and last for a long time.

the next defines how much material there is to definr the shape of space whic turns out to be pretty well flat.

Then there is the expansion rate of the universe

the next is rather abstruse and measures the binding energy of large structures like galaxies and how quickly things tend to collapse under self gravitiation

The last one is the number of spatial dimensions.