Lawrence M. Krauss A Universe from Nothing (2013)

     Lawrence M. Krauss A Universe from Nothing (2013) Krauss shows how the universe as we know it came to be. He reviews not merely what we now know (or may hypothesise), he gives us the history of the investigation. He does this by showing that the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” can be rephrased as “How did something arise from nothing?”, which makes it answerable. The alternative phrasing, “What purpose does the universe fulfill?” is unanswerable. It’s also pointless to try to answer it, for if there is no evidence of purpose, any answer is mere speculation, driven perhaps more by wish-fulfilment than an real desire to know the answer. Science deals only with answerable questions, which means the “unanswerable” puzzles of late night, beer-soaked sophomore restructured in operational terms. “Operational” here means “answerable by some objective method”. If you can’t re-phrase the question so that it points to some method or evidence that might answer it, then it’s a non-question.
     In short, by dealing with the epistemology of the question, Krauss clears the ground for an answer. The answer is, as Sir Arthur Eddington and others have repeatedly reminded us, “stranger than we can imagine”. Or as Krauss himself puts it, “The universe is cleverer than we are”.
     And what’s the answer? That “nothing” is unstable. It cannot persist. It must, sooner or later, produce something. That something may wink in and out of existence in a very short time, or because of some random imbalance in its constituents inflate into a universe such as the one we inhabit.
     Krauss is careful to limit his claims. Based on what we know, mostly evidence garnered from predictions derived from quantum theory, the Universe is 13.72 billion years old. That’s four significant figures, ie, +/-  10 million years (which is roughly the amount of time there have been hominids on Earth). But there are still unanswered questions. One of the implications of "something from nothing" is the multiverse, a possibly infinite collection of universes, most of which would not operate on the laws of physics that give rise to matter, and hence to stars and galaxies, and hence to life, and hence to us. There is at present no way to test this hypothesis, and it looks like there may never be one.
     Does Krauss make convincing case? Yes. He deals briefly with Creationist objections to evolution and cosmology. I like his “If you have no problems with an uncreated God, why do you have problems with an uncreated universe?” He does admit that he has no proof of the non-existence of some kind of god, but he declares that he doesn’t want to live in a universe created by a god of arbitrary whims and laws. He much prefers the amazing universe that physicists and cosmologists have revealed. It has one curious feature: because it is expanding, it will eventually reach a state where any future cosmologists will be able to know only their own galaxy. We live in a time that we are able to see evidence of the origins and history of the universe, and can extrapolate to a time when most of that knowledge will be practically impossible to discover. Why? Because it depends on observable evidence. Once those observations aren’t possible, neither are the testable hypotheses that we have been able to make.
     A sobering thought. It should, I think focus our attention on the more important big question: What kind of meaningful life can we live in a universe without apparent purpose? The answer is of course, a life that has meaning in human terms. If we begin \the construction of an answer with the observation that some of the things we do tend to damage or extinguish us individually and as a species, and that other things that we do tend to enhance our lives individually and as a species, then we won’t go far wrong in choosing rules of life that give us meaning and purpose.
     The book is longer than it needs to be. But it’s still worth reading. ***