There is no charge in the universe, and no energy. Mathematics is the key to understanding how something spring forth from this nothing, and is the thread from which the fabric of reality is woven.

What is the ultimate fabric of reality? My own position is quite clear: I am a materialist while being a scientist but a mathematical realist when being a speculator. Materialism, the view that the fundamental particles, including their agglomerations into atoms and molecules, together with the forces that bind them into interesting entities, are all that is necessary for all the properties of the world. There is nothing beyond these entities.

Scientists are hewers of simplicity from complexity: they chip away at the world around them, seeking to reveal the ultimate entities and at the same time stand in delight at the complexity that their interactions can yield. The reductionist program is the easy part. Much more difficult is the reverse journey from the identified simplicities up to the emergent properties that give us the natural world, up to and including consciousness.