Any old port in a storm?:
Our universe is the way it is, according to Neil Turok of the University of Edinburgh and Latham Boyle of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, for the same reason that air spreads evenly throughout a room: Weirder options are conceivable but exceedingly improbable.
The universe “may seem extremely fine-tuned, extremely unlikely, but [they’re] saying, ‘Wait a minute, it’s the favored one,’” said Thomas Hertog, a cosmologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
“It’s a novel contribution that uses different methods compared to what most people have been doing,” said Steffen Gielen, a cosmologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.
The provocative conclusion rests on a mathematical trick involving switching to a clock that ticks with imaginary numbers. Using the imaginary clock, as Hawking did in the ’70s, Turok and Boyle could calculate a quantity, known as entropy, that appears to correspond to our universe. But the imaginary time trick is a roundabout way of calculating entropy, and without a more rigorous method, the meaning of the quantity remains hotly debated. While physicists puzzle over the correct interpretation of the entropy calculation, many view it as a new guidepost on the road to the fundamental, quantum nature of space and time.
Charlie Wood, “Why This Universe? Maybe It’s Not Special—Just Probable” at Wired (January 22, 2023)
With – in the real world – only one actual universe to go on, how do we determine what is “probable”?