The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

by Sean Carroll

But the universe, and the laws of physics, aren’t embedded in any bigger context, as far as we know. They might be—we should be open-minded about the possibility of something outside our physical universe, whether it’s a nonphysical reality or something more mundane, like an ensemble of universes that make up a multiverse. In that context we could start asking questions about what kinds of universes are “natural” or easy to create, and possibly discover an explanation for the particular features we observe. Alternatively, we could discover reasons why the laws of physics themselves necessitate that something we thought was arbitrary (like the masses of the proton and the electron) can actually be derived from a deeper principle. Then, in a different way, we would be able to pat ourselves on the back for having explained something.