Until the past few years, physicists agreed that the entire universe is generated from a few mathematical truths and principles of symmetry, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of an electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood. However, two theories, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties.
Parameters most nearly means...