Why is the fine-structure constant approximately one over one hundred and thirty-seven? Why is the proton exactly 1836 times heavier than the electron? Why is gravity so absurdly weak compared to the other forces? For more than a century, physicists have measured the fundamental constants of nature with exquisite precision—yet no one can explain why they have the values they do.

Three answers have been proposed. The constants are brute accidents with no deeper explanation. They will one day be derived from a final theory. Or they are explained by the anthropic principle: we observe these values because only these values permit observers. Each answer has a fatal weakness.

This book proposes a fourth. Drawing on fixed-point theorems, topological degree theory, and the mathematics of self-consistency, Boris Kriger argues that the constants are irreducible residues of structural self-consistency—parameters that cannot be derived from first principles but are constrained to specific discrete values by the requirement that the universe hold together. They are neither accidents nor destinies. They are the prices the universe pays for its own coherence.

Written for the intelligent non-specialist, with no equations and no jargon, Could Physical Constants Be Different? takes the reader on a journey from the mystery of the numbers that run the world, through five axioms of persistence, a self-writing rulebook, and a landscape of possible universes, to a new understanding of why the anthropic principle is not wrong but merely incomplete—and why the evolved physicist who measures the constants is herself a consequence of the same principle that fixes them.

Based on the peer-reviewed paper included as an appendix, this book connects to three major programs in contemporary theoretical physics—asymptotic safety, the conformal bootstrap, and the swampland program—and shows that all three are instances of the same structural mechanism.