Brandon Carter(I)

Carter proposed the "Anthropic Principle" in Krakow, Poland in 1973, during a special two-week series of lectures commemorating Copernicus's 500th birthday. He proclaimed that humanity does indeed hold a special place in the Universe, an assertion that is the exact opposite of Copernicus's now universally accepted theory. His statement that day is now referred to as the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP) and runs like this: "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable, but they take on the values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so." Later, Carter also proposed the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP), which states that the Universe had to bring humanity into being. The SAP states that "the Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history."