As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: 'In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time.' To which adds Guth: 'Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.'

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.…

: as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: 'The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.'

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, non…

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.…

I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the mic…