Christoph Wetterich has put out a paper in which the universe isn't always expanding; it can be static or expanding just some of the time or even shrinking. And then there is an interaction which makes the masses of fundamental particles change in a complementary way, so as to preserve the properties of atoms, etc.
Now here is what I don't understand. An electron gets its mass through the Higgs mechanism. A nucleon gets its mass through QCD effects. The quarks also get their masses from the Higgs mechanism and that makes a very small contribution to the nucleon mass, but mostly the nucleon mass arises in a different way. So I just don't see how any simple mechanism of varying mass can preserve e.g. the electron/proton mass ratio. Is this a tremendous problem for his theory, or is there something I have overlooked?
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