note: this discussion has turned for the better;read pgs/Where do the laws come from?

No, there are many details buried in there that describe how the universe MUST unfold.New, but very unfinished ideas, such as string theory are able to predict, apparently, much of the nature of the universe. However,they have a problem of an embarrasment of riches as they predict a very large number of different universes with different laws. Maybe by as early as next year some experimental data will be available to start to sort out the competing ideas about how the universe came to be.Oh, btw, this is all before the big bang. The big bang is not very contentious any more and not at the leading edge of research. It is old, boring stuff now. I attended an interesting lecture by Roger Penrose a month or so ago. He was presenting an idea he has that is, as he emphasizes, highly speculative. He has grad students working on it now. It raise anew the idea of a cyclic universe. It started with his noticing of some funny things about the math describing the early universe and the universe of the very, very far future.