I love the ironic side of the article. Perhaps they should add the reason for it, from Fermi's and Neumann's. When you are building a model of reality in Physics, If something doesn’t fit the experiments, you can’t just add a parameter (or more) variate it and fit the data. The model should have zero parameters, ideally, or the least possible, or, even at a more deeper level, the parameters should emerge naturally fr…
Hmm.. Hodgin and Huxley did ground-breaking work on squid's giant axon and modelled neural activity. They had multiple parameters extracted from 'curve fitting' of recorded potential and injected currents which were much later mapped to sodium channels. Similarly, another process to potassium channels. I woudnt worry too much having multiple parameters -- even four when 3 can't just explain the model.
The physics equivalent is something like eternal inflation as an explanation for apparent fine-tuning - except that even if it's correct it's still absolutely nowhere near as complex or as contingent as biology.