I make a separate thread to address those comments in particular: > I have this sensation that people often hope to reduce physics to a few mathematical laws a

I make a separate thread to address those comments in particular: > I have this sensation that people often hope to reduce physics to a few mathematical laws and hope to find they don't even need any constants to measure for those laws - that they'll just pop out of symmetries or other purely mathematical properties, only being left with experiments to confirm that the universe does indeed conform to this mathematical model. Why we could not create an abstract system that when we plug in the constants we derive all the rules of our reality? And even better, this system would let us learn more on other universes by plugging different constants! If our abstract system does never contradict our reality when we plug the constants, then it is indiscernable from our reality, so we can accept it as a good model of our universe, even if it has very abstract foundations. > While that would be beautiful, I don't see any reason to expect it to be that way - to be able to prove that the properties of the universe (e.g. The charge of the electron, the mass of the quark) are logically necessary and not mere observations. You can draw the line where you want, some people take those as constants and develop theories from them, other people try to prove that those constants make sense in a greater theory. The same thing happens in maths, you can start with the real numbers, or even only with the naturals, while some other people will construct the numbers from first principles. Why? Why not! And we also have real Incentives : The beauty is when you discover a set of rules where everything we know works without contradiction. If we do not have this kind of system, then the logic would simply collapse and mathematics would have no validity whatsoever.