Frank Wilczek

If you don__ make mistakes, you__e not working on hard enough problems

QED [quantum electrodynamics] reduces ... "all of chemistry and most of physics," to one basic interaction, the fundamental coupling of a photon to electric charge. The strength of this coupling remains, however, as a pure number, the so-called fine-structure constant, which is a parameter of QED that QED itself is powerless to predict.

The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that __othing_ is unstable.