A Universe from Nothing

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing

Softcover edition
Author	Lawrence M. Krauss
Language	English
Subject	Physics Cosmology
Publisher	Free Press
Publication date	January 10, 2012
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Softcover), e-book
Pages	224 pp
ISBN	978-1-4516-2445-8
Dewey Decimal	523.1/8
LC Class	QB981 .K773 2012
Preceded by	Quantum Man
Followed by	The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing is a non-fiction book by the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, initially published on January 10, 2012, by Free Press. It discusses modern cosmogony and its implications for the debate about the existence of God. The main theme of the book is the claim that "we have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing—involving the absence of space itself and—which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction."

Publication

The book ends with an afterword by Richard Dawkins in which he compares the book to On the Origin of Species — a comparison that Krauss himself called "pretentious". Christopher Hitchens had agreed to write a foreword for the book prior to his death but was too ill to complete it. To write the book, Krauss expanded material from a lecture on the cosmological implications of a flat expanding universe he gave to the Richard Dawkins Foundation at the 2009 Atheist Alliance International conference. The book appeared on The New York Times bestseller list on January 29, 2012.

Reception

Praise

Caleb Scharf, writing in Nature, said that "it would be easy for this remarkable story to revel in self-congratulation, but Krauss steers it soberly and with grace".

Ray Jayawardhana, Canada Research Chair in observational astrophysics at the University of Toronto, wrote for The Globe and Mail that Krauss "delivers a spirited, fast-paced romp through modern cosmology and its strong underpinnings in astronomical observations and particle physics theory" and that he "makes a persuasive case that the ultimate question of cosmic origin – how something, namely the universe, could arise from nothing – belongs in the realm of science rather than theology or philosophy".

In New Scientist, Michael Brooks wrote, "Krauss will be preaching only to the converted. That said, we should be happy to be preached to so intelligently. The same can't be said about the Dawkins afterword, which is both superfluous and silly."

Critique

George Ellis, in an interview in Scientific American, said that "Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions." He criticized the philosophical viewpoint of the book, saying "It's very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy."

In The New York Times, philosopher of science and physicist David Albert said the book failed to live up to its title; he said Krauss dismissed concerns about what Albert calls his misuse of the term nothing, since if matter comes from relativistic quantum fields, the question becomes where did those fields come from, which Krauss does not discuss.

Commenting on the philosophical debate sparked by the book, the physicist Sean M. Carroll asked:

"Do advances in modern physics and cosmology help us address these underlying questions, of why there is something called the universe at all, and why there are things called 'the laws of physics,' and why those laws seem to take the form of quantum mechanics, and why some particular wave function and Hamiltonian? In a word: no. I don't see how they could. Sometimes physicists pretend that they are addressing these questions, which is too bad, because they are just being lazy and not thinking carefully about the problem. You might hear, for example, claims to the effect that our laws of physics could turn out to be the only conceivable laws, or the simplest possible laws. But that seems manifestly false. Just within the framework of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of possible Hilbert spaces, and an infinite number of possible Hamiltonians, each of which defines a perfectly legitimate set of physical laws. And only one of them can be right, so it's absurd to claim that our laws might be the only possible ones.

Invocations of "simplicity" are likewise of no help here. The universe could be just a single point, not evolving in time. Or it could be a single oscillator, rocking back and forth in perpetuity. Those would be very simple. There might turn out to be some definition of "simplicity" under which our laws are the simplest, but there will always be others in which they are not. And in any case, we would then have the question of why the laws are supposed to be simple?

Likewise, appeals of the form "maybe all possible laws are real somewhere" fail to address the question. Why are all possible laws real? And sometimes, on the other hand, modern cosmologists talk about different laws of physics in the context of a multiverse, and suggest that we see one set of laws rather than some other set for fundamentally anthropic reasons. But again, that's just being sloppy. We're talking here about the low-energy manifestation of the underlying laws, but those underlying laws are exactly the same everywhere throughout the multiverse.

We are still left with the question of there are those deep-down laws that create a multiverse in the first place."

See also

• Problem of why there is anything at all
• Quantum fluctuation

External links

• Official website