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I have heard that the universe can be explained in terms of the four fundamental forces. I have also heard it can be explained in terms such as space, time, energy, mass or even motion. To further complicate things, I've been told that charge can be considered a fundamental aspect of our universe.

I'm not looking for a unified theory, but I would like to know what has been empirically observed and used as as a fundamental 'dimension' of the physical universe. Are there any more other than the 10 listed above?

user2092608
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  • "..space, time, energy, matter or even motion.."-First of all we don't have proper definition for matter. – Sensebe Nov 15 '14 at 08:19
  • If we want to be strict with logic, your question as it appears in the title is ambiguous. This is because you have not defined what the "universe" is, and at the level of abstraction you would like to discuss this becomes important: its properties would depend on its definition. You may not know that mathematically (and the language of mathematics is usually the starting point for a physicist) the definition of universe is not absolute, and in fact poses a good number fundamental problems and paradoxes... – yuggib Nov 15 '14 at 10:00
  • ...such as the Russel's antinomy. If I would have to bet, I would say that for the purpose of physics the universe could be a sufficiently large Grothendieck universe. But maybe I am digressing too much ;-) – yuggib Nov 15 '14 at 10:10

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Once upon a time physicists dreamed that there would be one Theory of Everything (TOE) that would explain everything we see around us, or at least, from which all of the supposedly fundamental constants could be calculated and which would be so logically consistent it might explain why this is the only way things could be. That dream has died over the past few decades. Candidate TOEs seem to throw up vast arrays of alternatives with an invitation to pick one that seems to fit our observations. We appear to be ending up in one of a whole variety of classes of multiverse, with the one we find ourselves in being a selection based on the Weak Anthropic Principle