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Gefter over here at
Manhattan
magazine, I’m just calling because I attended yesterday’s symposium down at Princeton in honor of John Wheeler, and I wanted to check in with you to see if you need any coverage of it. We don’t really run science stories here at
Manhattan
, but physics is sort of a side hobby of mine. Anyway, there was some good stuff, so feel free to give me a call.”
    I left my number and hung up the phone. If we were going to do this, we were going to do it right, and that meant starting at the top.
    Phil from
Scientific American
called back the next day. “We had one of our editors at the symposium,” he told me, “so we’ve pretty much got it covered. But if you come up with some interesting angle, email me.”
    Interesting angle? I could do that. I sat down and looked over my notes from the meeting. Trying to pitch an article about any one talk wasn’t going to work—anyone who had been at the symposium could do that. Of course Wheeler’s strange message—
the universe is a self-excited circuit
,
the boundary of a boundary is zero
—was an angle, but I had no idea what the hell it meant. I’d have to find something else for now.
    That’s when I noticed a theme. Throughout the symposium, there had been a giant elephant in the room: the anthropic principle.
    The anthropic principle invoked our own existence to account for certain features of the universe—its size, its physical constants, the existence of stars and galaxies. Had those features been even slightlydifferent, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about them. At its worst, the anthropic principle was an empty tautology: we exist, therefore the universe is the kind of place that allows us to exist. At its best, it offered a way for physicists to explain why many cosmic features have such extraordinarily unlikely values—unlikely, but perfectly ripe for life.
    I sat down at my computer and composed an email to Phil suggesting a small news item entitled, “Physicists Can’t Avoid the
A
-Word.”
At the Science and Ultimate Reality conference
, I wrote,
physicist Andy Albrecht began his presentation by assuring the audience
,
“I’m not going to use the
A-
word.”
    Anthropic
had become a four-letter word because it veered uncomfortably close to religion, I explained—as if the universe, somehow, were built just for us. That is, unless our universe isn’t the only one. It’s like the Earth. Our homey planet is positioned at the perfect distance from the Sun to host liquid water; any closer and the water would turn to gas, any farther and it would freeze. If the Earth were the only planet—a lone rock adrift in the solar system—its water-bearing position would seem awfully miraculous. But with seven other planets wandering around out there, it’s hardly a miracle that we find ourselves on the one that’s suitable for life—we’re here because it’s the only place we can be. The same kind of anthropic selection bias can explain the life-bearing features of the universe, all for the low, low price of a few trillion extra universes. Not that it’s the kind of explanation anyone wants. Physicists want to explain the universe through logical and mathematical necessity. They want the world to be the way it is because that’s the
only
way a world could be. But according to the anthropic principle, anything goes.
    Still, everyone’s efforts to avoid the
A
-word seemed a little odd, given the occasion.
After all
, I wrote,
it was Wheeler who famously described the universe as “participatory,”
and once asked
,
“On what else can a comprehensible universe be built but the demand for comprehensibility?”
Wheeler didn’t believe that the universe was designed for us, nor that ours was a small island in a vast multiverse. He believed that the universe was right for observers because, somehow,