As we’ll see later, physicists from Hawking to Wheeler have taken things even further in the decades since, with concepts like the “participatory universe” in which we don’t merely create the present but the past as well. As the famed British cosmologist and Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has said, “The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.”
