Notwithstanding centuries of scientific progress, we are no closer to answering the question raised by Gottfried Leibniz—“Why is there something rather than nothing?”—than we were when the German philosopher first expressed this lean distillation of the mystery of existence. Not that people haven’t proposed creative ideas and provocative theories. But in asking a question of ultimate origin, we are seeking an answer that requires no antecedent, an answer that does not shift the question one step further back, an answer that is immune to the follow-on questions “Why were things this way instead
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