“Many people would claim that the boundary conditions are not part of physics but belong to metaphysics or religion. They would claim that nature had complete freedom to start the universe off any way it wanted.”

—  Stephen Hawking

"The Quantum State of the Universe", Nuclear Physics (1984) <!-- B239, p. 258 -->
Context: Many people would claim that the boundary conditions are not part of physics but belong to metaphysics or religion. They would claim that nature had complete freedom to start the universe off any way it wanted. That may be so, but it could also have made it evolve in a completely arbitrary and random manner. Yet all the evidence is that it evolves in a regular way according to certain laws. It would therefore seem reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the boundary conditions.

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Stephen Hawking 122
British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author 1942–2018

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