out of all the possibilities

Stephan Hawking, who holds Newton's Lucasian Chair at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleague Thomas Hertog of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, are about to publish a paper claiming that the Universe had no unique beginning.

They argue it emerged out of a profusion of beginnings, the vast majority of which withered away without leaving any real imprint on the Universe we know today. Only a tiny fraction of the beginnings blended to make the current cosmos.

Hawking and Hertog say that the countless alternative worlds of string theory may actually have existed, and we should picture the Universe in the first instants of the Big Bang as a river of all these possibilities.

Hertog says that our current Universe has features frozen in it from this early quantum mixture. If we start from where we are now, it is obvious that the current Universe must 'select' those histories that lead to these conditions, otherwise we simply wouldn't be here.

One could argue that the cosmos has structured itself around one's very own existence.

~ Do you see what they're saying here? It is something I've always believed - I am the center of my own universe. Now, what am I going to do about that...