That's why I didn't say metaphysics specifically. I really mean the scientific answer to the question rather than a philosophical one. How did we end up with bo

That's why I didn't say metaphysics specifically. I really mean the scientific answer to the question rather than a philosophical one. How did we end up with bosons, gluons, etc as opposed to anything else? Maybe it was totally random. A combo of it being random, the anthropic principle being true, and the possibility that the big bang was actually proceeded by the collapse of $current_universe - 1 due to heat death seems plausible. It could turn out we're actually on universe number 1 trillion and this was the first one where the randomness worked out where it'd support life. Or maybe it's even the second. We'd never be able to figure it out either way.