"With the laws of physics, you can get universes," said Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley, during a panel discussion at the June 23 SETICon 2 science and science fiction conference in Santa Clara, California.¹ He argued that the universe could have begun as a result of a random "quantum mechanical fluctuation."¹

by Jake Hebert, Ph.D., & Jason Lisle, Ph.D., *

Perhaps no realm of inquiry is as fraught with fantastic speculation as the origin of the universe. Theories of how it could have come about naturally have regularly been proposed and discarded as new evidence surfaces. Ongoing studies seem to have merely widened the gap in understanding how it began—or even how it currently works.