Frank Wilczek

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QED [quantum electrodynamics] reduces ... "all of chemistry and most of physics," to one basic interaction, the fundamental coupling of a photon to electric charge. The strength of this coupling remains, however, as a pure number, the so-called fine-structure constant, which is a parameter of QED that QED itself is powerless to predict

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The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable