"Set aside the many competing explanations of the big bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization - that something transcendent started it all - which has hard-science types... using terms like "miracle.""

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It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics.

— Martin Rees