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This is an interesting case of a conjecture holding true for small objects but breaking down for huge ones, without specifically adding that size in somehow.

Sometimes we tend to have this intuition that if a rule applies to all low numbers, than it must apply to all numbers, that there can't be some huge number after which it breaks down (unless of course it explicitly includes that huge number, such as the rule "all numbers are smaller than a billion billion billion").

This is such a powerful intuition, even though it's obviously wrong, that rules that break it are even seen as a problem. For example there is the so-called "hierarchy problem" in physics, which states something like "there is no reason why the weak force is so much stronger than gravity". As if 2 times as strong is somehow fundamentally different than it being 10^24 times as strong from a mathematical perspective. And this has ended up being called a major problem with the standard model, even though it's completely normal from a mathematical perspective.


Many examples of conjectures true for all n, until a very large one is eventually found : https://mathoverflow.net/questions/15444/examples-of-eventua...
One way to think of this is that smaller numbers are more constrained in a sense. As numbers get bigger more possibilities arise.

For example, in lower dimensions you get accidental isomorphisms [0]. These exist essentially because the defining equations are more constrained in lower dimensions.

A more tongue in cheek intuition is the interesting numbers theorem, which says essentially that every integer is interesting. One of the things that can make a number interesting is that there's a property for which it's the first counterexample.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exceptional_isomorphism

There are two kinds of naturalness principle in physics, sometimes called "technical naturalness" and "Dirac naturalness" respectively.

Dirac naturalness is as you describe: skepticism towards extremely large numbers, end of story. It has the flaw you (and every other person who's ever heard it) point out.

Technical (or t'Hooft) naturalness is different, and specific to quantum field theory.

To cut a long story short, the "effective", observable parameters of the Standard Model, such as the mass of the electron, are really the sums of enormous numbers of contributions from different processes happening in quantum superposition. (Keywords: Feynman diagram, renormalization, effective field theory.) The underlying, "bare" parameters each end up affecting many different observables. You can think of this as a big machine with N knobs and N dials, but where each dial is sensitive to each knob in a complicated way.

Technical naturalness states: the sum of the contributions to e.g. the Higgs boson mass should not be many orders of magnitude smaller than each individual contribution, without good reason.

The Higgs mass that we observe is not technically natural. As far as we can tell, thousands of different effects due to unrelated processes are all cancelling out to dozens of decimal places, for no reason anyone can discern. There's a dial at 0.000000.., and turning any knob by a tiny bit would put it at 3 or -2 or something.

There are still critiques to be made here. Maybe the "underlying" parameters aren't really the only fundamental ones, and somehow the effective ones are also fundamental? Maybe there's some reason things cancel out, which we just haven't done the right math to discover? Maybe there's new physics beyond the SM (as we know there eventually has to be)?

But overall it's a situation that, imo, demands an explanation beyond "eh, sometimes numbers are big". If you want to say that physical calculations "explain" anything -- if, for example, you think electromagnetism and thermodynamics can "explain" the approximate light output of a 100W bulb -- then you should care about this.

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