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Book information
A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing by
Lawrence Krauss
Published by: Free Press
Price: £17.99/$24.99
A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing by Lawrence
Krauss is excellent guide to cutting-edge physics; less good on theology
Editorial: "The Genesis problem"
IN 1996, Lawrence Krauss visited the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in
California. During his time there he gave a talk on his latest idea - that
empty space might contain energy. Afterwards, Krauss recalls, a young physicist
came up to him and said, "We will prove you wrong!"
That young physicist was Saul Perlmutter, who last month picked up a Nobel
prize - not for proving Krauss wrong, as it turns out, but for proving him
right. As part of the team who showed that the universe is expanding ever
faster, Perlmutter had defeated his own instincts and confirmed Krauss's hunch
that "nothing" is not quite what it seems.
As Krauss elegantly argues in A Universe From Nothing, the accelerating
expansion, indeed the whole existence of the cosmos, is most likely powered by
"nothing". Krauss is an exemplary interpreter of tough science, and the central
part of the book, where he discusses what we know about the history of the
universe - and how we know it - is perfectly judged. It is detailed but lucid,
thorough but not stodgy.
It is remarkable to think that, a century ago, quantum theory was barely
formed, general relativity was a work in progress and only a few scientists
believed there was a beginning to the universe. We have come a long, long way
since then by developing scientific tools that have proved themselves both
reliable and remarkably fruitful. As Krauss's insightful book shows, these days
we really can talk with scientific rigour about the history and even the
prehistoric origins of our universe.
Yet despite its clear strengths, A Universe From Nothing is not quite, as
Richard Dawkins hopefully declares in the afterword, a "knockout blow" for the
idea that a deity must have kicked the universe into being.
Krauss does want to deliver that blow: towards the end of the book, he promises
that we really can have something from nothing - "even the laws of physics may
not be necessary or required". Ultimately, though, he has to perform a little
sleight of hand. Space and time can indeed come from nothing; nothing, as
Krauss explains beautifully, being an extremely unstable state from which the
production of "something" is pretty much inevitable.
However, the laws of physics can't be conjured from nothing. In the end, the
best answer is that they arise from our existence within a multiverse, where
all the universes have their own laws - ours being just so for no particular
reason.
Krauss contends that the multiverse makes the question of what determined our
laws of nature "less significant". Truthfully, it just puts the question beyond
science - for now, at least. That (together with the frustratingly opaque
origins of a multiverse) means Krauss can't quite knock out those who think
there must ultimately be a prime mover. Not that this matters too much: the
juvenile asides that litter the first third of the book (for example, "I am
tempted to retort here that theologians are expert at nothing") mean that, by
the time we get to the fascinating core of his argument, 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.
A Universe From Nothing is a great book: readable, informative and topical.
Inexplicably, though, Dawkins compares it to On the Origin of Species, and
suggests it might be cosmology's "deadliest blow to supernaturalism". That
leaves the reader with the entirely wrong sense of having just ingested a
polemic, rather than an excellent guide to the cutting edge of physics. Krauss
doesn't need Dawkins; a writer this good can speak for himself.
Michael Brooks is the author of Free Radicals: The secret anarchy of science
(Profile, 2011)
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