In the nineteenth century, the smart money in science was on the view that we don’t need to explain how the universe came to be because, well, it has always been. But discoveries in physics and astronomy put an end to this static-eternal model of the universe, and cosmologists now generally agree that our universe did have a beginning. So, what many thought never happened and didn’t need explaining—the origin of the universe—suddenly cried out for an explanation. Then scientists began to uncover what today is widely known as fine-tuning: The laws and constants of physics and chemistry appear
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