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

by Lawrence Krauss

infinitesimal point, which he called the “Primeval Atom”

There is a valuable lesson here. As Lemaître recognized, whether or not the Big Bang really happened is a scientific question, not a theological one.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, was employed as a “computer” at the Harvard College Observatory. (“Computers” were women brought in to catalogue the brightness of stars recorded on the observatory’s photographic plates;

By nothing, I do not mean nothing, but rather nothing—in this case, the nothingness we normally call empty space.

The proton is intermittently full of these virtual particles and, in fact, when we try to estimate how much they might contribute to the mass of the proton, we find that the quarks themselves provide very little of the total mass and that the fields created by these particles contribute most of the energy that goes into the proton’s rest energy and, hence, its rest mass. The same is true for the neutron, and since you are made of protons and neutrons, the same is true for you!

Inflation is the only currently viable explanation of both the homogeneity and flatness of the universe, based on what could be fundamental and calculable microscopic theories of particles and their interactions.

And if inflation indeed is responsible for all the small fluctuations in the density of matter and radiation that would later result in the gravitational collapse of matter into galaxies and stars and planets and people, then it can be truly said that we all are here today because of quantum fluctuations in what is essentially nothing.

Quantum fluctuations, which otherwise would have been completely invisible, get frozen by inflation

and emerge afterward as density fluctuations that produce eve...

If we are all stardust, as I have written, it is also true, if inflation happened, that we all, literally, em...

And after all of this, it may be that physics will become an “environmental science.” The fundamental constants of nature, so long assumed to take on special importance, may just be environmental accidents. If we scientists tend to take ourselves and our science too seriously, maybe we also have taken our universe too seriously. Maybe literally, as well as metaphorically, we are making much ado about nothing. At least we may be making too much of the nothing that dominates our universe! Maybe our universe is rather like a tear buried in

a vast multiversal ocean of possibilities. Maybe we will never find a theory that describes why the universe has to be the way it is. Or maybe we will. That, finally, is the most accurate picture I can paint of reality as we now understand it. It is based on the work of tens of thousands of dedicated minds over the past century, building some of the most complex machines ever devised and developing some of the most beautiful and also the most complex ideas with which humanity has ever had to grapple. It is a picture whose creation emphasizes the best about what it is to be human—our ability to imagine the vast possibilities of existence and the adventurousness to bravely explore them—without passing the buck to a vague creative force or to a creator who is, by definition, forever unfathomable.

I want thus to return to the question I described at the beginning of this book: Why is there something rather than nothing? We are now presumably in a better position to address this, having reviewed the modern scientific picture of the universe, its history, and its possible future, as well as operational descriptions of what “nothing” might actually comprise. As I also alluded to at the beginning of this book, this question too has been informed by science, like essentially all such philosophical questions. Far from providing a framework that forces upon us the requirement of a creator, the very meaning of the words involved have so changed that the sentence has lost much of its original meaning—something that again is not uncommon, as empirical knowledge shines a new light on otherwise dark corners of our imagination. At the same time, in science we have to be particularly cautious about “why” questions. When we ask, “Why?” we usually mean “How?” If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes. For example, we might ask: “Why is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?” but what we really probably mean is, “How is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?” That is, we are interested in what physical processes led to the Earth ending up in its present position. “Why” implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it.

But no one ever said that the universe is guided by what we, in our petty myopic corners of space and time, might have originally thought was sensible. It certainly seems sensible to imagine that a priori, matter cannot spontaneously arise from empty space, so that something, in this sense, cannot arise from nothing. But when we allow for the dynamics of gravity and quantum mechanics, we find that this commonsense notion is no longer true. This is the beauty of science, and it should not be threatening. Science simply forces us to revise what is sensible to accommodate the universe, rather than vice versa.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” would be that “nothing” is unstable.

one can imagine one specific type of universe that might spontaneously appear and need not disappear almost immediately thereafter because of the constraints of the Uncertainty Principle and energy conservation. Namely, a compact universe with zero total energy. Now, I would like nothing better than to suggest that this is precisely the universe we live in. This would be the easy way out, but I am more interested here in being true to our current understanding of the universe than in making an apparently easy and convincing case for creating it from nothing.

The apparent logical necessity of First Cause is a real issue for any universe that has a beginning. Therefore, on the basis of logic alone one cannot rule out such a deistic view of nature. But even in this case it is vital to realize that this deity bears no logical connection to the personal deities of the world’s great religions, in spite of the fact that it is often used to justify them.

The universe is far stranger and far richer—more wondrously strange—than our meager human imaginations can anticipate.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Ultimately, this question may be no more significant or profound than asking why some flowers are red and some are blue. “Something” may always come from nothing. It may be required, independent of the underlying nature of reality. Or perhaps “something” may not be very special or even very common in the multiverse. Either way, what is really useful is not pondering this question, but rather participating in the exciting voyage of discovery that may reveal specifically how the universe in which we live evolved and is evolving and the processes that ultimately operationally govern our

existence.

As Heraclitus of Ephesus wrote in a slightly different context, “Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayers were heard, all things would pass away.”

I have always been attracted to the myth of Sisyphus and have likened the scientific effort at times to his eternal task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to have it fall back each time before he reaches the top. As Camus imagined, Sisyphus was smiling, and so should we. Our journey, whatever the outcome, provides its own reward.

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.

The choice to turn to the notion of divine creation falls to each of us, of course, and I don’t expect the ongoing debate to die down anytime soon. But as I have stressed, I believe that if we are to be intellectually honest, we must make an informed choice, informed by fact, not by revelation.