Lawrence M. Krauss

I won't go into any detail, as there are plenty of other reviews that give more of an overview. My only comment, and it's difficult to say this without being snarky or sarcastic, is that Krause simply never answers the question. Or rather, he pulls a bait and switch which is very typical of amateurs who deign to write about the big questions of metaphysics, but merely succeed in displaying their ignorance, or even worse, their dishonesty. Whether Krauss is merely incompetent or just show more dishonest, I cannot say. What I can say is that not only does he not answer the question, he doesn't even address the question,. Instead he commits an equivocation fallacy that renders his entire book irrelevant. If anything, this is a superb example of why having a PhD in one field means zero in when it comes to writing in another field. And make no mistake, the question of why there is something rather than nothing is not a question of physics. It is a question of metaphysics. It is a philosophical and theological question. The physical sciences simply do not have, and by their very nature cannot possibly have, the tools required to answer it. Krauss may be a very fine physicist, but his mistakes in this book are unworthy of a freshman philosophy major.

The basic issue is that instead of offering a theory of how the universe came into being from nothing, he changes the definition of nothing, thus avoiding the question entirely. So let's set the record straight. The definition of the word "nothing" in the historical discourse is this: nothing means absolute non-being, the utter lack of existence of anything, including space, time, matter, energy, vacuums, or anything else of any imaginable existence and substance whatsoever. So when Krauss speaks of quantum fluctuations in nothing, he is actually talking about SOMETHING. Krauss redefines the word "nothing" to mean something which is already there, presumably existing eternally, and in this something (empty space or whatever) another something that is already there begins to fluctuate. OK, well where did these things come from then? How did they get there? Why is there THAT something, rather than true nothing (non-being)?

Once this move is made, the entire book sinks into the quicksand of irrelevance. It may be that the physics it contains is interesting in its own right. But so far as resolving the question he promises to address, it has nothing whatever to say. So I leave this book with one star, which is more generous than it deserves. Really, the only point of this book is to serve as an illustration of fallacious argumentation in an introduction to logic class. Or perhaps it can be a warning to scientists that if they are going to play in the philosophers' playground, then they should at least understand the basic questions at stake. Or better yet, why don't they stick to what they know and leave the philosophy to those who are trained to do it. It's no wonder Richard Dawkins approves the book. After all, he's the poster boy for a scientist who demonstrates utter incompetence in his attempts to address philosophy of religion (i.e. The God Delusion). If anyone wants to see an intelligent discussion of these issues, well, I would strongly urge you to not waste your time with scientists doing amateur philosophy. Really, it's just down right embarassing. show less

Reading A Universe from Nothing, physicist Lawrence Krauss' hybrid of a science book and an anti-religion polemic, I couldn't help but think it would have been a much better book to read back in 2012, when it was first published. For not only has the science moved on (at one point, Krauss speculates on what the Large Hadron Collider might tell us, now that it has started running (pg. 35)), but his ardent New Atheist rhetoric hasn't, and reminds us that, unfortunately, that particular show more intellectual movement hasn't made any movement at all in the years since.

Krauss is at his best when he commits to the actual science. He starts slow, going into some of the basics of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics for the general reader, before stepping things up a notch and formulating his argument as to 'why there is something rather than nothing'.

Essentially, and without going into the nitty-gritty of how Krauss backs up his argument, it amounts to the fact that what we call 'nothing' – that is, empty space – is in fact a teeming morass of virtual particles and other such astrophysical peculiarities. There is, in fact, a great amount of energy in this empty space – something that we call 'dark energy' (which is different from dark matter). Because of quantum fluctuations, this dark energy can not only create 'something' out of this 'nothing', but it is inevitable that it will do so, resulting in a universe. 'Nothing' is inherently unstable (pg. 170). To paraphrase Voltaire, the universe is so strange that if it didn't exist someone would have to invent it.

Krauss smooths out the edges of this theory, and presents it more comprehensively than I have done. It is, I admit, sometimes a bit too comprehensive, and Krauss can get lost in the weeds, happily expounding on ideas that are familiar to him but not so much to us. By the time he started talking about Feynman's ideas of "sum over paths formalism" (pg. 162), he not only lost me – a fairly regular science reader – but, I realised, had already left most of his general audience behind.

This is a shame, because the book really shines when Krauss reflects on some of the implications of his arguments, and of the logical and conceptual developments in modern science. Some of these have become slightly hackneyed and Instagram-worthy (such as the line about how every atom in our bodies has come from inside a star (pg. 17)), but many remain profound. In his Afterword, Richard Dawkins rightly notes how striking is Krauss' observation that, at some point in the far-distant future, it will be impossible for astronomers to verify that the universe started with a Big Bang (pg. 107). The cosmic background radiation that serves as its evidence for us will have dissipated too widely to be identifiable. So too the galaxies: they will have moved so far apart that their light will be on too great a wavelength to reach our eyes. Unnervingly, Krauss notes, it may be that, should our current knowledge be lost by then (as it surely would on such a timescale), then those astronomers of the future would not know there was a Big Bang, or that there were even other galaxies. "It is sobering to suggest that one can use the best observational tools and theoretical tools at one's disposal and nevertheless come up with a completely false picture of the large-scale universe" (pg. 118).

Considering this admission, it is strange that Krauss is so secure and complacent in his view of God and religion. The religion vs. science debate is something that, like politics, is a tremendously interesting arena that has become increasingly tedious and disappointing due to the all-but-complete inability (or unwillingness) of each side to understand the other. It is the main flaw in Krauss' book and it ought not form such a big part of my criticism. But Krauss makes his anti-theist opinions a central and unavoidable part of his book, so we as readers have to meet him there. We either ignore it (which would half the book in length), oppose it (making the book disagreeable) or agree with it. My assessment is that these parts of the book will only appeal to those who already agree with such overtly New Atheist views, making for a rather polarising – not to say redundant – reading experience.

There is something slightly obnoxious and self-satisfied about the New Atheist conversation (and I say that as someone who happily delved into that milieu between 2008 and 2016). Krauss, to his credit, refrains for the most part from taking cheap shots at those who believe in a 'sky-god' and a man who walks on water, but, even as someone who has no deep, inherited belief system or spiritual identity, and who values knowledge and reason, I find something distasteful about contemporary 'scientism'. On two occasions in A Universe from Nothing, Krauss proudly volunteers the fact that he carries a card around in his wallet with a graph on it, for when he meets people who don't believe the Big Bang happened (pp18, 111). This, to me, does not seem like an appropriate use of a professor's time or mental energy, and is akin to a champion boxer roaming the streets looking for a fight, or a millionaire responding to a poor person saying that there's no money by pulling out a wad of bills and saying "no, you're wrong, there's plenty". People unable or unwilling to acknowledge logic – such as the logic behind the Big Bang, or any claim backed by verifiable scientific data – are people to be pitied, quietly or even silently. Ignored, not mocked and eviscerated. Maybe it's an American thing (Krauss delivers that hoary old chestnut about how more Americans believe in angels than in evolution), but from here in England it seems a lot like punching down, or attacking straw men. Scientists and educated people need to get over the fact that some people are dumb, and focus on improving their ideas by having the necessary conversations on a higher intellectual plain.

Krauss' decision to go on the offensive against religion is not only slightly obnoxious and quixotic, but it leaves him open to some irresistible counter-attacks. It is something of a Pyrrhic victory when Krauss successfully argues for why there is something rather than nothing, for if Krauss had kept this as a solely scientific argument (i.e. the afore-mentioned 'quantum fluctuations' in empty space) it would have been extremely gratifying. But by chaining it to his anti-religion cudgel, he over-reaches. By straying too far onto this ground, he reminds us that, as far as metaphysics goes, he has not proven that 'something' can arise out of 'nothing'. Compelling as a scientific observation, his argument that empty space in fact contains plenty of quantum energies and virtual particles reminds us that his 'nothing' is in fact a 'something'. The question remains: how did those quantum energies and virtual particles, those 'somethings', get to be in that 'empty' space in the first place? The underlying metaphysical argument remains unaddressed.

Had Krauss stuck to the science, it would not have to be this way. He is at his best when discussing the implications of scientific discoveries: for example, when discussing the afore-mentioned observation about how future astronomers won't have any clue about the Big Bang, he toys with the anthropic principle by saying that we live in a 'special time'. "Dark energy is measurable today because 'now' is the only time in the history of the universe when the energy in empty space is comparable to the energy density in matter" (pg. 122). In the following paragraphs, he notes the irony that this cutting-edge scientific discovery turns the Copernican principle inside out. After all, Copernicus' discovery that we're not the centre of the universe, or even of our solar system, was one of the great conceptual leaps that led science to its current place.

I could have done with more such content in Krauss' book. It is there, and in sufficient quantities to make its reading worthwhile, but those logical counterattacks to Krauss' over-commitment to the anti-God bit are, as I said earlier, irresistible. He claims he attacks God because there's no place for such a being without observable evidence, and yet makes the afore-mentioned acknowledgement that we live in a 'finite time' in which dark energy is observable (pg. 109), and that, correspondingly, there may emerge "some new observable quantities we cannot yet detect" that could be sifted by the astronomers of the future (pg. 116). This has some unacknowledged implications for his worldview: is the Big Bang true now, but not objectively true for those future astronomers, for to them it won't be verifiable? Is such objectivity unattainable? Krauss is pulling the reader into these ill-advised and unnecessary loops, and what is more he leaves them unaddressed. He acknowledges that astronomers of the future will not be able to observe much of the cosmological evidence that we can observe today, but avoids entirely the obvious logical corollary (raised by Neil deGrasse Tyson - https://youtu.be/TgA2y-Bgi3c?t=334 - on a talk show, of all the things) that there may well be things unobservable today that were observable to astronomers of a previous cosmic iteration. Maybe all traces of God have disappeared, and only His laws are left.

By this, I do not intend a theist 'gotcha' – I am not referring to the sort of 'God' who cares about unleavened bread and onanism, but the sort of 'God' that Einstein referred to: the convenient byword for undiscovered gubernatorial powers, sublime natural symmetries and exciting, as-yet-unknown forces. It is quite sad that I even feel the need to point this out, such is the state of the tedious, zero-sum religion-versus-science debate. The attacks, launched from both sides, muddy what should be clear waters, and Krauss' book, for all its fine qualities, is very much a part of this self-defeating trend.

A Universe from Nothing, which could have been a good popular science book, diminishes itself by scratching its itch and aligning itself more with the science-adjacent New Atheist movement. I can't escape the feeling that this movement has been watching its pot. Having lost its most eloquent and admirable advocate in Christopher Hitchens in 2011 (Krauss writes in his Preface that he had wanted Hitch to contribute a foreword), its remaining members have been diminishing in intellectual freshness and cultural relevance ever since. This is sad, and you find yourself wanting the self-described rationalists to rouse themselves. But then you come across an unreflective line like the following, from page 174 of A Universe from Nothing, that it is a "simple fact that nature may be cleverer than philosophers and theologians". It's hard not to recognise the inferred assumption that nature is not cleverer than atheists and scientists, and to be turned off by it. show less

Lawrence M. Krauss has attempted to answer the question of why is there something rather than nothing. I.e., how did our universe evolve? He claims that religion and theology have been at best irrelevant, because positing a god does not solve the problem of “Who created the creator?” He has a different agenda:

“The purpose of this book is simple. I want to show how modern science, in various guises, can address and is addressing the question of why there is something rather than show more nothing: The answers that have been obtained—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.”

Krauss first develops the arguments concerning the “big bang,” which is currently accepted by the vast majority of scientists and cosmologists. He then proceeds to explain that quantum physics requires that “virtual particles” pop in and out of existence all the time. He argues that modern physics views what we might call “nothing” as a seething field of virtual particles required by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. He also discusses dark matter and dark energy before explaining the possibility of many universes (the “multiverse”) unlike our own coming into existence through natural processes.

Krauss doesn’t actually claim that he has the definitive answer to why there is something rather than nothing. Rather, he avers he is presenting an alternative to a theological approach, which he believes is more intellectually satisfying, even if not dispositive:

“In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant."

Those of you hoping to find a definitive answer to why there is a universe rather than nothing may be disappointed by this book. But then you would probably be disappointed by every book written on that deeply troublesome topic. I found this book to be stimulating and provocative, and I highly recommend it.

(JAB) show less

Pretty technical book, but not as technical as a text book. You must have an advanced hobbyist knowledge of modern physics to appreciate and learn from the book. The most telling line was loosely: "You can never prove something true in science, but only prove claims false." I've been ruminating over this for days, it is so powerful considering our currently politicized science.