What I found in Vilenkin’s work surprised me. In his use of quantum cosmology, Vilenkin was clearly attempting to model the origin of the universe as a consequence of a deeper physical law or theory. But he exhibited a much more profound sense of the difficulty of this endeavor than either Krauss or Hawking. He also showed a keen sense of the paradoxical or even contradictory aspects of invoking a mathematical equation developed in the human mind as the cause of an actual universe.
