RE: How to build our Universe using only 4 rules
I am not agreeing with the introduction to your post. Just to mention two points among others:
There are dozens of laws that govern it with new fields and subatomic particles discovered and theorized about each year.
That's not true. The last discovered particle was the Higgs boson in 2012 and the one before was the top quark in 1995... The number of laws governing the particle interactions is a very small number (one hand is enough to enumerate them).
On top of that a lot of the fundamental forces are finely tuned to such a degree that if they were were altered by the tiniest fraction, the universe could not exist.
This is also not true. The forces and the way they work do not require any fine tuning and this is not connected to the existence of the universe at all. You mix things here.
Ok I guess the word "discovered" should be redacted. I meant theorized about. I'm constantly reading articles that are trying to patch holes in our current understanding using new particles or fields.
Your second point is very much up for debate. This is the most obvious thing I can link you to on the subject, but the discussion is very extensive if you read around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe
There are plenty of theories beyond the standard model. These usually assume new particles that could be discovered if these theories are realized in Nature. This is however far from being the case in light of current data. The Standard Model however features many conceptual issues and practical limitations so that it is generally considered as a low-energy limit of a more fundamental theory to be discovered. This is why theories beyond the Standard Model are designed and studied at the moment: to be prepared for the exploration phase at the LHC.
Concerning the fine-tuning, this is one of the conceptual issues mentioned above. This has nothing to do with the forces, but with the Higgs boson and the quantum corrections to its mass (and the fact that we have two different scales in the game: the Planck scale where we know the Standard Model mist be replaced my something else and the electroweak scale which is the currently probed energy regime). Many of the theories beyond the Standard Model address this problem.
I hope I clarified :) Otherwise, do not hesitate to ask. This is my day job ^^
The article is merely suggesting how we can come to a seemingly complicated universe from a few basic rules.
I know. I was only complaining about the (first version of the) introduction :)