IT IS one of the biggest questions confronting physics: why is our universe the way it is? If some of the fundamental laws were even slightly different, our universe would be a strange and lethal place. Instead, it seems exquisitely tuned to make life possible.
So far, string theory, the leading contender for a “theory of everything”, has failed to explain why this should be so. The best it can offer is that our universe is not particularly special because the big bang could have produced any one of a staggering number of vastly different universes, all just as likely as each other. “The anthropic approach…
