A group of Brazilian researchers has presented an innovative proposal to resolve a decades-old debate among theoretical physicists: How many fundamental constants are needed to describe the observable universe? Here, the term “fundamental constants” refers to the basic standards needed to measure everything.
The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The group argues that the number of fundamental constants depends on the type of space-time in which the theories are formulated; and that in a relativistic space-time, this number can be reduced to a single constant, which is used to define the standard of time. The study is an original contribution to the controversy sparked in 2002 by a famous article by Michael Duff, Lev Okun and Gabriele Veneziano published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
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