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W hy are we here? It’s a question that has troubled philosophers, theologians and those who’ve had one drink too many. But theoretical physicists have a more essentialist way of asking the question: why is there anything here at all? For two decades now, theorists in the thinkbig field of cosmology have been stymied by a mathematical quirk in their equations. If the number controlling the growth of the Universe since the Big Bang is just slightly too high, the Universe expands so rapidly that protons and neutrons never come close enough to bond into atoms. If it is just ever-so-slightly too small, it never expands enough, and everything remains too hot for even a single nucleus to form. Similar problems afflict the observed masses of elementary particles and the strengths of fundamental forces. In other words, if you believe the equations of the world’s leading cosmologists, the probability that the Universe would turn out this way by chance are infinitesimal — one in a very large number. “It’s like you’re throwing darts, and the bullseye is just one part in 10 of the dart board,” says Leonard Susskind, a string theorist based at Stanford University in California. “It’s just stupid.”