Constants of Nature — The Gods of Modernity

What exactly are constants of nature? Remarkably, physics, considered the most exact of all sciences, hasn’t a good answer. Are they essential for a rational description of reality? No. Fundamental constants are the gods of modernity. But only history makes us understand why it is the job of theoretical physicists to explain them.

“I cannot imagine a reasonable unified theory containing an explicit number which the whim of the Creator could just as easily have chosen differently.” — Albert Einstein

Imagine looking at the starry sky in the Stone Age, without smog, urban light pollution, and all other annoyances of modern civilization. There can be no doubt that human beings back then were intrigued by the stars and tried to comprehend the laws of the spectacle going on in the skies. In the early hunter-gatherer societies, observing natural phenomena led people to create the first mythologies. Already in ancient Egypt, the appearance of Sirius, which usually preceded the flooding of the Nile, was understood as a signal to start cultivating the fields. This is how we react as human beings: a continuous process of reasoning takes place in our mind, and we try to make sense of what we perceive, connecting facts that may or may not be causally related after all. Back then, it seemed more than obvious that what was going on in the skies was ruled by…