As another example, Lee Smolin disagrees with anthropic principle, because he believes anthropic principle doesn't allow to study such fundamental problems. At least he thinks solving these fundamental problems is science's business.
>Not quite. It was declared useless to think about precisely because physics can't answer the most fundamental question of "Why". Richard Feynman went off on an interviewer for asking "Why are they doing that?"
In Chinese, Korean or Japanese, "how" and "why" are the same word. A "why" after all, always decomposes into a "there is" (fields, particles, properties such as mass) and a "how" (the associated laws). Physics is restricted to the latter but hasn't been able to find a definitive frontier between the two. A "there is" often decomposes into another "how" and another "there is" after progress is made. Example: mass and the higgs field.
We won't know until we try. Like Poincaré conjecture was pending for a century.