The question of why anything exists at all did not make it into Emil du Bois-Reymond's catalog of seven Welträtsel. Yet it is probably the most fundamental of all questions mankind has ever asked. Creation myths can be found in all regions and epochs of the world, telling how the world came into being from nothing. Modern science also offers such a creation story. According to this story, our universe was created in a big bang. About 14 billion years ago, all the energy in the universe was concentrated in one tiny point in space. Then, for some unknown reason, space expanded very rapidly, the universe cooled down, and the energy condensed into particles of matter that came together to form the celestial bodies and chemical compounds that later gave rise to life on Earth and possibly other planets.
However, the big bang theory cannot answer three big questions: Was the evolution of the universe into intelligent beings like us humans inevitable? Could the universe have looked different? And why did the Big Bang happen? In the last years of his life, Albert Einstein pondered the question of whether God had a choice in the laws of physics and the constants of nature. According to many physicists and cosmologists today, it is quite conceivable that different physical laws could prevail in a universe and that the initial conditions of the Big Bang could have been different. However, no humans would have been created, because in most cases there would have been no structures in the universe at all - no stars, no galaxies, no atoms, no chemical compounds, and consequently no intelligent beings capable of thinking about the universe.
Thus, for the emergence of humans to have been possible in the course of the evolution of the universe, the prevailing laws and initial conditions in the universe must have been very finely balanced. The fact that this fine-tuning of conditions existed in our universe is explained by the anthropic principle: we can only observe a universe whose laws and initial conditions allowed humans to evolve. If we do not want to assume that the universe was created with the intention of bringing us humans into existence, we are left with the speculative hypothesis, based on biological evolution, that our universe is just one universe among many others whose laws and initial conditions happened to be such that we could come into existence as humans.
This idea of a "multiverse" consisting of many universes is very popular among some physicists, while others criticize that universes other than our own will, by definition, never be observable, and that a purely speculative hypothesis such as the multiverse has no place in empirical science. Instead of believing in the existence of many parallel universes, it is also conceivable that our universe swings back and forth like a pendulum between a "big bang" and a "final plop," looking slightly different in each cycle. And perhaps we simply do not yet know the inner connections that link the initial conditions and laws in each universe, so we erroneously assume too wide a range of possible universes.
However, all these speculative considerations cannot answer the core question: Why is there something and not simply nothing? As difficult as it is to find the reason for our existence, it is equally certain that we must exist in order to be able to ask the question about our existence. I can doubt everything, but I must always assume that it is I who asks the questions and thinks about the answers. The French scholar René Descartes (1596-1650) captured this insight in these famous words: Ego cogito, ergo sum.
If the only certainty we can have is that we must exist in order to be able to think about the world, the opposite thought suggests itself: Does the world exist only so that we can recognize it? Was Douglas Adams (1952-2001) perhaps not so wrong in his legendary science fiction novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that an intelligent being built a supercomputer to find the answer to the question of the universe, life and all the rest - except that it wasn't mice who built the Earth as a supercomputer, but a divine architect who set up an experiment with our universe to find out whether it is possible for the world to see through itself? If that were the case, the divine architect would probably stop his experiment once we had cracked the last riddle of the world. In order not to jeopardize our existence, it would probably be better if we did not completely lift the mysterious veil of the world's riddles ...
In the end, the answer is perhaps disappointingly simple and equally puzzling: 42
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