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One of the most baffling mysteries for physicists is why the values our universe has. Why is gravity the weakest of the four forces, why do neutrinos have mass, why are there up, down, charm, etc. quarks with different values of mass, spin, charge. Why is 70% of our universe dark energy, why is 25% of it dark matter, and why is the paltry 5% that's left the mass (baryonic mass) that we are familiar with. Why.
The truth is, we have no clue...but we're working on it. One of the strengths of the yet untested and unvalidated string theory is that many of these values (charge, spin, etc.) pop right out as solutions to the string theory equations. But with these solutions, there are more questions raised...for example, why does string theory predict the strength of the graviton to be orders of magnitude greater than observations show it should be? [One explanation (a WAG) is that part of each graviton exists in other, higher dimensions...or even in other, parallel universes.]
What is truly amazing is that each value has to be just so or our universe would change radically. That is, for example, if there were only down quarks, there would be no protons or neutrons...at least not as we know them. Thus, there would be no atoms as we know them and, therefore, no matter as we know it. All for the lack of down quarks.
Our universe is like a giant house of cards, you remove one card and the entire thing collapses into...who knows what?
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