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

by Lawrence Krauss

We are hardwired to think that everything that happens to us is significant and meaningful. We have a dream that a friend is going to break her arm, and the next day we find out that she sprained her ankle. Wow! Cosmic! Clairvoyant? The physicist Richard Feynman used to like to go up to people and say: “You won’t believe what happened to me today! You just won’t believe it!” And when they would inquire what happened, he would say, “Absolutely nothing!” By this he was suggesting that when something like the dream I described above happens, people ascribe significance to it. But they forget the myriad nonsense dreams they had that predicted absolutely nothing. By forgetting that most of the time nothing of note occurs during the day, we then misread the nature of probability when something unusual does occur: among any sufficiently large number of events, something unusual is bound to happen just by accident.