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by polyphonicist 2310 days ago
That's interesting indeed. Any idea why Physics constants obey Benford's Law? Did the universe pick the physical constants from an exponential distribution?
1 comments

In this particular case it's mostly reflecting our choices of units, and the fact that changing the units can change the constants by many orders of magnitude. Benford's law comes from a distribution which is invariant under that kind of change.

However, it's an interesting question whether the dimensionless fundamental constants have a deeper explanation, since they don't depend on unit choices. The fermion masses are roughly evenly distributed logarithmically, for example (which leads to Benford's law). There isn't a clear reason why.