ANTHROPIC COSMOLOGY. An anthropic argument is one which suggests that certain physical conditions, such as the oxygen content of the atmosphere or the Earth's distance from the Sun, are not inadvertently beneficial to intelligent life, but might actually be especially fine-tuned for life. This viewpoint has been slow to gain acceptance among scientists because anthropic logic seems to defy the arrow of time: was not the universe here long before man evolved? Yes, but there may be more than one universe (as some theories predict), or the universe we are in may have many domains, each with different physical parameters. And we would, according to these arguments, find ourselves in that domain that had just the right physics ingredients, just as cold-blooded reptiles thrive only in warm climates. Physicists at the Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware (contact Stephen Barr, 302-831-6883) and the University of Massachusetts (John Donoghue, 413-545- 1940) consider what the anthropic principle has to say not about atmospheric oxygen and Earth orbit, but about parameters of even more fundamental importance: the mass of the Higgs boson (the hypothetical particle that endows all other particles with mass), the cosmological constant (essentially the energy density of the universal vacuum), and the Planck mass (the energy scale---thought to prevail in the very early universe---associated with gravity, and the energy at which all known physical forces would have been equivalent). (V. Agrawal et al., Physical Review Letters, 2 March 1998.)