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

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Lawrence Maxwell Krauss (born 1954) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and director of its Origins Project. He has written other books such as Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory, Fear of Physics, The Physics of Star Trek, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, Quintessence: The Search For Missing Mass In The Universe, etc.[NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 202-page paperback edition.]He wrote in the Preface to this 2012 book, “‘Why are there six planets?’ … was [in 1595] considered a meaningful question, one that revealed purpose to the universe. Now, however, we understand the question is meaningless… we know our solar system is not unique… More than two thousand planets orbiting other stars have been discovered… The important question then becomes not ‘WHY?’ but ‘HOW does our solar system have nine planets?’… we realize that there is nothing … that points to purpose or design… So too, when we ask, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ we really mean, ‘How is there something rather than nothing?’… the question I really care about… is the question of how all the ‘stuff’ in the universe could have come from no ‘stuff,’ and how, if you wish, formlessness led to form. That is what seems so astounding and nonintuitive… Common sense suggests that ‘nothing’ … should have zero total energy. Therefore, where did the 400 billion or so galaxies that make up the observable universe come from? The fact that we need to refine what we mean by ‘common sense’ in order to accommodate our understanding of nature is, to me, one of the most remarkable and liberating aspects of science.” (Pg. xv-xvi)He adds, “Can one ever say anything other than the fact that the nothing that became our something was a part of ‘something’ else, in which the potential for our existence, or any existence, was always implicit? In this book I take a rather flippant attitude toward this concern, because I don’t think it adds anything to the productive discussion, which is ‘What questions are actually answerable by probing the universe?’ I have discounted this philosophical issue … because I think it bypasses the really interesting and answerable physical questions associated with the origin and evolution of the universe. No doubt some will view this as my own limitation, and maybe it is. But it is within that context that people should read this book… But don’t discount the remarkable human adventure that is modern science because it doesn’t console you.” (Pg. xvii) He begins the Preface with the statement, “In the interests of full disclosure I must admit that I am not sympathetic to the conviction that creation requires a creator, which is at the basis of all the world’s religions.”He continues, “The purpose of this book is simple. I want to show how modern science… is addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The answers that have been attained---from staggeringly beautiful experimental observations, as well as from the theories that underlie much of modern physics---all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem. Indeed, something from nothing may have been REQUIRED for the universe to come into being. Moreover, all signs suggest that this is how our universe COULD have arisen.” (Pg. xxiii)He continues, “Surely, invoking ‘God’ to avoid difficult questions of ‘how’ is merely intellectually lazy. After all, if there were no potential for creation, then God couldn’t have created anything. It would be semantic hocus-pocus to assert that the potentially infinite regression is avoided because God exists outside nature … My real purpose here is to demonstrate that in fact science HAS changed the playing field, so that these abstract and useless debates about the nature of nothingness have been replaced by useful, operational efforts to describe how our universe might actually have originated.” (Pg. xxv)He goes on, “the immediate motivation for writing this book now is a profound discovery about the universe … that has resulted in the startling conclusion that most of the energy in the universe resides in some mysterious, no inexplicable form permeating all of empty space… this discovery has produced remarkable new support for the idea that our universe arose from precisely nothing… The direct genesis of this book hearkens back to October of 2009, when I delivered a lecture in Los Angeles with the same title. Much to my surprise, the You Tube video of the lecture… has since become something of a sensation, with more than 1.5 million viewings… I thought it worth producing a more complete rendition of the ideas that I had expressed there in this book.” (Pg. xxvii-xxviii)He explains, “By ‘nothing,’ I do not mean nothing, but rather NOTHING---in this case, the nothingness we normally call empty space. That is to say, if I take a region of space and get rid of everything within it---dust, gas, people, and even the radiation passing through, namely absolutely EVERYTHING within that region---if the remaining empty space WEIGHS SOMETHING, then that would correspond to the existence of a cosmological term such as Einstein invented.” (Pg. 58) Later, he adds, “after a century of trying, we have measured the curvature of the universe and found it to be zero. You can understand why so many theorists like me have found this not only very satisfying, but also highly suggestive. A universe from Nothing… indeed.” (Pg. 104)He argues, “It is now traditional to think of ‘our’ universe as comprising simply the totality of all that we can now see and all that we could ever see… The minute one chooses this definition for a universe, the possibility of other ‘universes’---regions that have always been and always will be causally disconnected from ours, like islands separated from any communication with one another by an ocean of space---becomes possible, at least in principle… A number of central ideas that drive much of the current activity in particle theory today appear to require a multiverse. I want to stress this because, in discussions with those who feel the need for a creator, the existence of a multiverse is viewed as a cop-out conceived by physicists who have run out of answers---or perhaps questions. This may eventually be the case, but it is not so now. Almost every logical possibility we can imagine regarding extending the laws of physics as we know them, on small scales, into a more complete theory, suggests that, on large scales, our universe is not unique.” (Pg. 126)He observes, “There is a difference between these proposed hidden domains and the domains of spirituality and religion… In the first place, they are accessible in principle if one could build a sufficiently energetic accelerator… Second, one might hope, as one does for virtual particles, to find some indirect evidence of their existence via the objects we can measure in our four-dimensional universe. In short, because these dimensions were proposed as part of a theory developed to actually attempt to explain the universe, rather than justify it, they might ultimately be accessible to empirical testing…” (Pg. 133)He asserts, “something can arise from empty space PRECISELY because the energetics of empty space, in the presence of gravity, are NOT what common sense would have guided us to suspect… But no one ever said that the universe is guided by what we… might have originally thought was sensible. It certainly seems sensible to imagine that a priori, matter cannot spontaneously arise from empty space, so that SOMETHING, in this sense, cannot arise from NOTHING. But when we allow for the dynamics of gravity and quantum mechanics, we find that this commonsense notion is no longer true.” (Pg. 151)He contends, “The metaphysical ‘rule,’ which is held as an ironclad conviction by those with whom I have debated the issue of creation, namely that ‘out of nothing nothing comes,’ has no foundation in science… All it represents is an unwillingness to recognize the simple fact that nature may be cleverer than philosophers or theologians. Moreover, those who argue that out of nothing nothing comes seem perfectly content with the quixotic notion that somehow God can get around this. But… if one requires that the notion of true nothingness requires not even the POTENTIAL for existence, then surely God cannot work his wonders, because if he does cause existence from nonexistence, there must have been the potential for existence.” (Pg. 174)He continues, “to posit a god who could resolve this conundrum… often is claimed to require that God exists outside the universe and is either timeless or eternal. Our modern understanding of the universe provides another … far more physical solution … I refer here to the multiverse. The possibility that our universe is one of a large, even possibly infinite set of distinct and causally separated universes, in each of which any number of fundamental aspects of physical reality may be different, opens a vast new possibility for understanding our existence.” (Pg. 174-175)He adds, “the response to why there is something rather than nothing becomes almost trite: there is something simply because if there were nothing, we wouldn’t find ourselves living here! I recognize the frustration inherent in such a trivial response to what has seemed such a profound question throughout the ages. But science has told us that anything profound or trivial can be dramatically different from what we might suppose at first glance.” (Pg. 177-178)Krauss indeed goes far beyond his YouTube lecture in this book; whether one agrees with all of its ideas or not, this book will be almost “must reading” for anyone interested in such cosmological and philosophical questions.

Lawrence Krauss does a wonderful job of explaining the history and current status of observational and theoretical cosmological investigations. I liked his explanation of how the experimental measurements of the granularity of the cosmic background microwave radiation show that the universe is flat, e.g. without curvature. As a quantum physicist, I was pleased, but not surprised, to find out that the universe of real matter that we see resulted from quantum fluctuations during inflation. There is no need to invoke string theory, additional dimensions, or branes. Go quantum mechanics! Einstein might not have been pleased. He was not happy about the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. He was reputed to have said that "God does not play dice." Perhaps, that was his greatest blunder.Last year, as I was doing some gardening on a hot summer day, I was approached by two overly well-dressed people, who were representing their religion. After informing them that I already had a religion that laid claim to a history that beat theirs by over 5000 years, we discussed the intervention of God in the daily lives of people. I referred to what I thought was a very improbable event, something that would qualify as a miracle. I said that you could pray all you want, but not even God could make the Mets beat the Yankees. They agreed with me on that point, but walked away without even leaving any of their literature.This year, the Mets played the Yankees four times and won all four games. One explanation for this is that there is a being, who is a baseball fan, who delights in helping the hapless Mets. He has intervened for them on several occasions, most notably in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. How could anyone imagine that Mookie Wilson's slow grounder would go through the legs of a major league first baseman? A miracle indeed.Another explanation for the Mets' miracles is that improbable events do occur. In the Many Worlds formulation of quantum mechanics, whenever an event can have multiple possible outcomes, every one of those outcomes occurs in a different parallel universe. We happen to live in a universe in which improbable events have benefited the Mets. Thus the Mets' improbable victories may also be viewed as quantum fluctuations. Supernatural intervention is not required.