Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

by Jim Holt

If you turn on your television and tune it

between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe. What greater proof of the reality of the Big Bang—you can watch it on TV.

Heidegger distinguished between fear, which has a definite object, and anxiety, a vague sense of not being at home in the world. What, in our anxious states, are we afraid of? Nothing! Our existence issues from the abyss of nothingness and ends in the nothingness of death. Thus the intellectual encounter each of us has with nothingness is suffused with the dread of our own impending nonbeing.

Rudolf Carnap, observed that the existentialists had been fooled by the grammar of “nothing”: since it behaves like a noun, they assumed, it must refer to an entity—a something. This is the same blunder that the Red King makes in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: if Nobody had passed the messenger on the road, the Red King reasoned, then Nobody must have arrived first. Treating “nothing” as the name of a thing allows one to generate endless paradoxical twaddle, as the opening paragraphs of this very chapter attest.

The transition from Nothing to Something seems mysterious, because you never know what you’re going to get.

Everything has an entropy. The entropy of our universe, considered a closed system, is always increasing, as things move from order to disorder. That is the second law of thermodynamics. And what about Nothingness? Can it be assigned an entropy?

It has become a “veritable mantra,” Grünbaum complained, that the simplicity of nothingness makes it objectively more probable.

Leibniz took the opposite, “relationist” position. He argued, against Newton, that time was merely a relation among events. In a static world—a world without change, without “happenings”—time would simply not exist.

But it’s such an important book! I stammered. The Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit declared Nagel’s book the greatest philosophical work of the postwar era.

Start by observing that a self-explanatory being must exist as a matter of necessity. And if it exists necessarily, it must exist always and everywhere—that is, it must be eternal and infinite. It must also be powerful, since it caused the contingent world to come into existence. Moreover, it must be intelligent, since intelligence exists in the world and therefore must exist in its cause. And since it is also infinite, it must be infinitely powerful and infinitely intelligent. Finally, it must be morally perfect. For, being infinitely intelligent, it can never fail to apprehend the truth as to what is good; and, being infinitely powerful, it can never be prevented by any weakness of its own

from acting in accordance with that truth.

He is by definition a maximally great being. Unlike a teapot, his greatness—and therefore his existence—is stable across different possibilities. So if God exists in some possible world, he must exist in every possible world—including the actual world. In other words, if it is even possible that God exists, then it is necessary that he exists. That is the rather breathtaking conclusion of the modal ontological argument. And it is an entirely valid one, at least within the framework of modal logic. (To

“On the question of why there is something rather than nothing, I’m not sure I know anything apart from that joke,”

Newton’s laws were rules that any such system would obey. It’s a different style of explanation, one that hadn’t been thought of before, one that wouldn’t even have been considered an explanation

before.

All possible worlds would exist, but

they would exist as “parallel universes,” in

logical isolation from on...

The largest of them, which we might call the maximal world, would itself contain every possibility, mirroring the richness of the entire ensemble of possible worlds that made up reality as a whole. At the other end of the range of possibilities would be the minimal o...

Science cannot answer the deepest questions. As soon as you ask why there is something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. —ALLAN SANDAGE, the father of modern astronomy

But any attempt by science to answer them faces a seemingly insuperable obstacle, known as the singularity.

The reason there is Something rather than Nothing is, as they fancifully put it, that nothingness is unstable.

there are a hundred billion galaxies just in the little region of it we can observe, each with a

hundred billion stars—could have arisen from nothing.

“Bats,” he said in a hushed voice. “They’re all going to take off together in just a few minutes. Happens every night. It’s something to see.”

thought of one of the “messages from the unseen” that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the

grace of tragedy.”

See Mystery to Mathematics fly! In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. —ALEXANDER POPE, The Dunciad

Mysticism and mathematics go way back together.

Platonism is understandably seductive to mathematicians. It means that the entities they study are no mere artifacts of the human mind: these entities are discovered, not invented.

Mathematicians are like seers, peering out at a Platonic cosmos of abstract forms that is invisible to lesser mortals.

Could it be that mathematics furnishes the key to the mystery of being?

Penrose is among the most formidable mathematical physicists alive. He has been hailed by fellow physicists, notably Kip Thorne, for bringing higher mathematics back into theoretical physics after a long period in which the two fields had ceased to communicate.

It’s almost as though the physical world is built out of mathematics!”

Pythagoras’s mystical doctrine that the world was constituted by mathematics: all is number.

they were chained in the allegorical darkness of Plato’s cave, condemned to live in a world of shadows. They could have no genuine knowledge of reality.

That is why, in the words of Georg Cantor, who pioneered the theory of infinity, “the essence of mathematics is freedom.”

It says that nothing really exists unless it is

a composite of structure and stuff.

And that would violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which does not permit the simultaneous determination of a particle’s position and momentum.

What it presents us with is one great relational web: all structure, no stuff.

then mathematical structure is tantamount to physical existence. Who needs flesh when bones are enough?

They look on the universe as a giant computer simulation.

“the physical universe is a concept.”

this is exactly what we mean by existence, namely, that thinking and feeling beings think and feel themselves to exist.”

Such a flowchart of causal connections can be implemented in a software program, which, if run on a computer, would simulate being in pain.

When quantum entanglement occurs, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.

The idea that goodness can be responsible for existence has had quite a long history—which, as I’ve said, was a great disappointment for

me to discover, because I’d have liked it to have been all my own.”