"Our particular laws are not at all unique. ...they could change from place to place and from time to time. The Laws of Physics are much like the weather... controlled by invisible influences in space almost the same way as that temperature, humidity, air pressure, and wind velocity control how rain and snow and hail form. ...The Landscape... is the space of possibilities... all the possible environments permitted by the theory. ...[T]heoretical physicists ...have always believed that the laws of nature are the unique, inevitable consequence of some elegant mathematical principle. ...the empirical evidence points much more convincingly to the opposite conclusion. The universe has more in common with a Rube Goldberg machine than with a unique consequence of mathematical symmetry. ...Two key discoveries are driving the paradigm shift—the success of inflationary cosmology and the existence of a small cosmological constant."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (2005) pp. 12-13.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant
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Cosmological constant
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