“During one seminar offered by this group, I heard a statement that shocked me. The speaker walked us through what the chances were that our universe would come into existence and concluded that the odds that our universe would form in the way that it did, with a big bang at high energies, were nearly zero! In fact, it was possible to calculate the odds, which the eminent British mathematician and theoretical physicist Roger Penrose (later a Nobel Prize laureate) had done in the late 1970s. When Penrose calculated the likelihood of our universe spontaneously forming, he got a staggering number: 1 in 10^10^123. Less than a one in a googolplex chance.”
―
Laura Mersini-Houghton,
Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond
