The Great Question — “Is Our Universe Extremely Unnatural, a Weird Permutation?”

“Is our universe extremely unnatural, a weird permutation among countless other possibilities, observed for no other reason than that its special conditions allowed life to arise, or, are the properties of the universe are inevitable, predictable, that is, ‘natural,’ locking together into a sensible pattern?” This is the question, the great unknown, that preoccupies theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J.

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The Shape-Shifting Cosmos –“Huge Clue to the Nature of the Ultimate Truth”

“Paleontologists infer the existence of dinosaurs to give a rational accounting of strange patterns of bones. We look at patterns in space today, and we infer a cosmological history in order to explain them,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist and cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, who looks at the hidden patterns exposed by the fundamental symmetries of the universe and suggests a new mathematical framework for explaining them.

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