Jim Bailey

“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

“had prepared myself for the likelihood that I would fail. In fact, the entire field of theoretical physics prepares you to cope with disappointments and failure. For theoretical physicists, a best-case scenario is one where only nine out of ten of your ideas are wrong—and even then, most of us never know that we were correct one-tenth of the time, because opportunities for theoretical physicists to test their new ideas observationally are rare. But where observations fail, the scrutiny of peers comes to the rescue. The theoretical physics community operates like an extended family. The bond among its members is based not on blood but on a deep respect for one another’s views. Of course, as in any family, respect has to be earned the hard way—in our case, by contributing to groundbreaking ideas and advancing knowledge. To that end, we scrutinize, criticize, and work hard to pinpoint logical flaws in the ideas of our colleagues as well as in our own. Even if we rip apart each other’s reasoning, we remain united by our shared pursuit of the same goal: to learn the true answer to the mysteries of nature.”
― Laura Mersini-Houghton, Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond

“Anthropic selection started off by assuming the very answer we wanted to hear and then tried to rationalize its choice.”
― Laura Mersini-Houghton, Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond