I am not really sure how to phrase the question properly. I know in our universe we have somewhat consistent laws of physics. Is their any identifiable feature in our universe that if different would allow for different laws of physics in a different universe?
The wiki article on the “Fine-Tuned Universe” is a good place to start:
My understanding is that the theory is that if physical constants such as the speed of light or the gravitational constant we’re different, the universe as we know it could not exist, and therefore life itself could not exist.
The Universal Constants, like “c” and “G” and “e” all fit that description.
I think what I was getting at was is there anything we know of that affects those constants?
If they could be affected, they wouldn’t be “Constants”. They’d be Variables. 
How close are physicists to being able to deduce the properties of simple chemicals (e.g. water, oxygen, methane) from fundamental physics constants?
Every time I see this, I get annoyed. I view it as a failure of imagination.
I could accept if it was amended to “life itself as we know it could not exist”. That’s not to say that for every possible value of the Great Constants of the Universe life would always exist. But it seems highly likely to me that for several different values of those constants – different rolls of the cosmic Dice, you might say – a physical universe could exist for which life is probable.
And it’s only in those possible universes in which life is possible that intelligent, thinking life could evolve to ponder why it is that conditions are “just right” for their kind of life to evolve. Think of it as an “Anthropic Principle” that doesn’t actually require anthros.
My beef, in other words, is that the way this is often stated implies that only with the Universal Constants tuned exactly the way they are could life even exist to ponder why it exists. It seems likely to me that there are a great many possible combinations of those constants for which a viable physical universe exists that can harbor intelligent life. And only in those universes would beings with insufficient imagination be declaring that only in a universe like theirs, fine-tuned as it is, could intelligent life exist.
Don’t ask me what those universes would be like. Extrapolating an alternative physical universe from different constants is a very complex game. As one physicist put it, given the laws of matter he could easily imagine a solid or a gas, but he would never have thought of a liquid. I know I sure as heck wouldn’t. Trying to build up what an alternative atom would look like when you change the values of the electric charge, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light ( and therefore changing other stuff, like the fine structure constant) is beyond me.
There may be many possible alternate universes with advanced life, but what is their measure? If you throw darts at the parameters in a universe otherwise just like ours, how many darts will you need to throw before you get lucky and hit on a “good” one? I think that some intelligent thinkers speculate that the odds of getting so lucky are very slim. Our life depends on complex molecules like protein and nucleic acid, and it can be argued that life is very unlikely without something similar. Goldilocks had to work her magic several times just to get any magnesium to put in chlorophyll!
The final sentence I’ve quoted — that our universe has good parameters or we wouldn’t be here to talk about it — is conceded by everyone in the thread, I think.
One of my points, however, is that only in such Goldilocks universes will there be beings who can wonder that parameters for life exist at all. In the failures, there’s nobody around to see that it IS a failure.
As for whether the likelihood of intelligent-life-bearing universes is high or low, I admit that I have no idea. You’d have to carry out something like the Drake equation, with a string of probabilities that would have huge error margins. I frankly don’t know whether the probabilities are slim or large. My natural pessimism might make me lean towards “slim”, but it could very well be that possible intelligent life universes are actually common.
The problem is we’ve only got one universe to look at, and it isn’t possible to extrapolate from a sample size of one.
We don’t really have a firm understanding about why/how the big bang happened and when/why/how these universal constants were determined, so I don’t think we currently have an answer to your question.
No, this is not a failure of the imagination, and it really has nothing to do with anything resembling the Drake Equation. From the very first paragraph of the Wiki article:
Physicists haven’t just come up with this by bullshitting in a bar over a few beers. They have been trying to find models that constrain the parameter values for decades, and nothing seems to work. The point is that, based on the only physical models that do seem to work, most of the available parameter space does not result in a stable universe at all. It’s not a “failure of the imagination” to suppose that the evolution of any kind of self-aware being requires at the very least the existence of stable matter.
We have recently discussed this at length, e.g. here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20146004&postcount=36
You either do not understand what I’m saying, or are deliberately misunderstanding or misconstruing it
.
I certainly don’t deny that a universe with different parameters would be radically different from the one we live in. As your own cite of yourself says, that leads to a vast number of different types of presumably stable matter. The failure of imagination comes from not holding that such other types of matter might not harbor intelligent life, if of a vastly different type than we are familiar with.
And any of the possibilities relies on a concatentation of probabilities, which is precisely like the dRake equation.
??? No, the thing I was pointing out is that the vast majority of parameter space does not give stable matter at all.
Now, this is model dependent, and it may turn out that there is another model for universe formation that doesn’t turn out like this. But nobody has been able to find one.
But the problem certainly isn’t “a failure of the imagination”, it’s not that physicists think all life must look exactly like us. But it does seem fairly uncontroversial that you at least need some kind of stabile matter in a universe for life of any description to evolve.
This thread has drifted quite a bit from the OP, which was asking about would changes to the constants affect laws of physics. The issue of the possibility of life when changing those constants seems unresponsive to the question.
As CalMeacham suggests, maybe we don’t know what a universe with different constants would be like. I am not a physicist so I have no earthly idea. But surely somebody has put forward some possibilities. If c were 1/10 if what it is here, what would the universe be like? Is it even meaningful to ask such a question?
Intelligent thinkers would be correct to be dubious that we just got lucky in this universe IF you posit that there is only one universe and there never will be another. If we ponder the notion that this universe is one of an infinite succession of universes or one in an infinite multiverse then actually the chances of this universe existing is 100% and it is not lucky at all.
So, you’re siding with Tegmark and his Computable Universe Hypothesis? 
[cf, other recent thread]
Lee Smolin proposed a very interesting if highly speculative explanation for the fine tuning of our universe’s parameters in The Life of the Cosmos. He proposes that the collapse of a black hole causes the creation of a new universe with parameters similar to but possibly slightly different from those of the parent universe. Given this, universes will “evolve” in a way similar to the way living creatures evolve, with natural selection favoring universes with many black holes. Since an easy way to produce black holes is by stellar collapse, this also tends to favor universes with many stars, and hence, universes containing matter.
No, the problem is that different parameters often resort in a universe that has no stable matter at all. If you read the wikipedia article, a lot of times the result is not ‘matter would be a bit different’, but ‘stable conglomerations of matter would not exist’ or ‘we can’t see even theoretically how intelligent life would arise’.
For a simple example, look at the number of dimensions. If you only have 1 or 2 spatial dimensions, how do you build intelligent life? You can’t have connections that cross each other, so there doesn’t appear to be any way to create something like a brain or computer to think with. If you have 4 or more spatial dimensions, then gravity falls off quickly enough that matter can’t enter into stable orbits, which means you have no way to form large scale stellar structures, and you kind of need something like stars and planets to have stuff to make the building blocks of life out of and later for life to live on. With more than one time dimension, you don’t have cause and effect, and a given event isn’t necessarily in your future or past. It’s unclear how you could develop something we’d call intelligence without cause and effect existing, and without the ability to pose questions about the world.
A physics paper was posted a few years ago that argued that [del]intelligent life[/del] an interesting universe required specifically 3 space-like dimensions and 1 time-like dimension.
But I came to nitpick the part I italicised. You may be quite correct in practical terms for the purpose of the thread, but Von Neumann’s Selfrep Automaton operates in 2 dimensions, as does Conway’s Life, and Wolfram’s. Martin Gardner published a column decades ago showing how to build a wire-crossover using nand-gates.
Dewdney’s book The Planiverse goes into a fair amount of detail about how life and technology would work in a 2D universe. It does talk a bit about microbiology although it mainly focuses on issues of macroscopic technology.