Most of the history of physics has been focused on the question: given a set of initial conditions, what is the future evolution of the system? But this quest will come to end at some point, when we would have found the laws governing such evolution. I argue that the really fundamental and interesting questions start at that point. These are questions of the following kind. What determines the initial state of the Universe? What principle fixed the laws of evolution to the ones that we have found? I will argue that there are places in physics today where we can start to explore such questions. In particular the recent progress in the quantum theory of black holes may offer novel ideas in these directions.
Samir D. Mathur