Is Our Universe a Big Schrödinger's Cat---Where It's Alive Is Where We Live?

In the early 1960s, Princeton physicist Robert Dicke invoked the anthropic principle to explain the age of the universe. He argued that this age must be compatible with the evolution of life, and, for that matter, with sentient, conscious beings who wonder about the age of the universe. In a universe that is too young for life to have evolved, there are no such beings. Over the decades, this argument has been extended to other parameters of the universe we observe around us, and thus to questions such as: Why is the mass of the electron 1,836.153 times smaller than that of the proton? Why are the electric charges of the up and down quarks exactly 2/3 and -1/3, respectively, on a scale in which the electron's charge is -1? Why is Newton's gravitational constant, G, equal to 6.67384 x 10^-11? And, the question that has deeply puzzled so many ...