The nine dials
Every constant in the tuner, dissected: what it really is, why life cares, both ways it kills — and a button that breaks it live.
gravity vs. everything else
The weakest force runs the longest show. Gravity's feebleness is the reason stars live long enough for anything to watch them.
the nuclear glue
0.007: the sliver of mass hydrogen pays out as light. The tightest honest window in cosmology — and the reason carbon exists.
the amount of stuff
Density against the knife edge between eternal expansion and recollapse. Ours is suspiciously close to perfect — a mystery of its own.
the push of empty space
The energy of nothing, measured at 10⁻¹²² of what theory screams it should be. The worst prediction in physics — and the number that decides whether structure gets to exist.
the primordial lumps
One part in 100,000: the size of the seed wrinkles in the infant universe. No lumps, no galaxies. Too many, and everything falls straight into black holes.
why there is any matter at all
For every billion matter-antimatter pairs in the infant universe, one extra particle of matter. That sliver is everything you see — and nobody knows why.
Dark matter fraction
How much of the universe's mass is invisible. Galaxies are held together by matter that light cannot see.
Fine structure constant
The strength of electromagnetism — chemistry's one number. Nudge it and atoms change size; nudge it harder and there are no atoms.
Spatial dimensions
How many dimensions space has. Three is the only number where orbits — and therefore everything built on orbits — can exist.