It is hard to know how our future descendants will regard the
little sliver of history that we live in. It is hard to know what events
will seem important to them, what the narrative of now will look like
to the twenty-fifth century mind. We tend to think of our time as one
uniquely shaped by the advance of technology, but more and more I
suspect that this will be remembered as an age of cosmology---as
the moment when the human mind first internalized the cosmos that gave
rise to it. Over the past century, since the discovery that our universe
is expanding, science has quietly begun to sketch the structure of the
entire cosmos, extending its explanatory powers across a hundred billion
galaxies, to the dawn of space and time itself. It is breathtaking to
consider how quickly we have come to understand the basics of everything
from star formation to galaxy formation to universe formation.
And now, equipped with the predictive power of quantum physics,
theoretical physicists are beginning to push even further, into new
universes and new physics, into controversies once thought to be
squarely within the domain of theology or philosophy.
In
January, Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and Director of the
Origins Institute at Arizona State University, published A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing,
a book that, as its title suggests, purports to explain how
something---and not just any something, but the entire universe---could
have emerged from nothing, the kind of nothing implicated by quantum
field theory. But before attempting to do so, the book first tells the
story of modern cosmology, whipping its way through the big bang to
microwave background radiation and the discovery of dark energy. It's a
story that Krauss is well positioned to tell; in recent years he has
emerged as an unusually gifted explainer of astrophysics. One of his
lectures has been viewed over a million times on YouTube and his cultural reach extends to some unlikely places---last year Miley Cyrus came under fire when she tweeted a quote
from Krauss that some Christians found offensive. Krauss' book quickly
became a bestseller, drawing raves from popular atheists like Sam Harris
and Richard Dawkins, the latter of which even compared it to The Origin of Species for the way its final chapters were supposed to finally upend "last trump card of the theologian."
By
early spring, media coverage of "A Universe From Nothing" seemed to
have run its course, but then on March 23rd the New York Times ran a blistering review
of the book, written by David Albert, a philosopher of physics from
Columbia University. Albert, who has a PhD in theoretical physics,
argued that Krauss' "nothing" was in fact a something and did so in
uncompromising terms:
"The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields... they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story."
Because
the story of modern cosmology has such deep implications for the way
that we humans see ourselves and the universe, it must be told correctly
and without exaggeration---in the classroom, in the press and in works
of popular science. To see two academics, both versed in theoretical
physics, disagreeing so intensely on such a fundamental point is
troubling. Not because scientists shouldn't disagree with each other,
but because here they're disagreeing about a claim being disseminated to
the public as a legitimate scientific discovery. Readers of popular
science often assume that what they're reading is backed by a strong
consensus. Having recently interviewed Krauss for a different project, I
reached out to him to see if he was interested in discussing Albert's
criticisms with me. He said that he was, and mentioned that he would be
traveling to New York on April 20th to speak at a memorial service for
Christopher Hitchens. As it happened, I was also due to be in New York
that weekend and so, last Friday, we were able to sit down for the
extensive, and at times contentious, conversation that follows.
by Ross Andersen, The Atlantic | Read more:
