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Trying to make the cosmos out of nothing 11 January 2012 by Michael Brooks Magazine issue 2847 . Subscribe and save For similar stories, visit the Books and Art Topic Guide

Book information A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing by

Lawrence Krauss Published by: Free Press Price: 17.99/$24.99

A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing by Lawrence Krauss is excellent guide to cutting-edge physics; less good on theology

Editorial: "The Genesis problem "

IN 1996, Lawrence Krauss visited the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory inCalifornia. During his time there he gave a talk on his latest idea - that empty space mightcontain energy. Afterwards, Krauss recalls, a young physicist came up to him and said,"We will prove you wrong!"

That young physicist was Saul Perlmutter, who last month picked up a Nobel prize - not for proving Krauss wrong, as it turns out, but for proving him right. As part of the team whoshowed that the universe is expanding ever faster, Perlmutter had defeated his own instinctsand confirmed Krauss's hunch that "nothing" is not quite what it seems.

As Krauss elegantly argues in A Universe From Nothing , the accelerating expansion,indeed the whole existence of the cosmos, is most likely powered by "nothing". Krauss isan exemplary interpreter of tough science, and the central part of the book, where hediscusses what we know about the history of the universe - and how we know it - is

perfectly judged. It is detailed but lucid, thorough but not stodgy.

It is remarkable to think that, a century ago, quantum theory was barely formed, generalrelativity was a work in progress and only a few scientists believed there was a beginning tothe universe. We have come a long, long way since then by developing scientific tools thathave proved themselves both reliable and remarkably fruitful. As Krauss's insightful bookshows, these days we really can talk with scientific rigour about the history and even the

prehistoric origins of our universe.

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Yet despite its clear strengths, A Universe From Nothing is not quite, as Richard Dawkinshopefully declares in the afterword, a "knockout blow" for the idea that a deity must havekicked the universe into being.

Krauss does want to deliver that blow: towards the end of the book, he promises that we

really can have something from nothing - "even the laws of physics may not be necessaryor required". Ultimately, though, he has to perform a little sleight of hand. Space and timecan indeed come from nothing; nothing, as Krauss explains beautifully, being an extremelyunstable state from which the production of "something" is pretty much inevitable.

However, the laws of physics can't be conjured from nothing. In the end, the best answer isthat they arise from our existence within a multiverse, where all the universes have theirown laws - ours being just so for no particular reason.

Krauss contends that the multiverse makes the question of what determined our laws ofnature "less significant". Truthfully, it just puts the question beyond science - for now, atleast. That (together with the frustratingly opaque origins of a multiverse) means Krausscan't quite knock out those who think there must ultimately be a prime mover. Not that thismatters too much: the juvenile asides that litter the first third of the book (for example, "Iam tempted to retort here that theologians are expert at nothing") mean that, by the time weget to the fascinating core of his argument, Krauss will be preaching only to the converted.

That said, we should be happy to be preached to so intelligently. The same can't be saidabout the Dawkins afterword, which is both superfluous and silly. A Universe From

Nothing is a great book: readable, informative and topical. Inexplicably, though, Dawkinscompares it to On the Origin of Species , and suggests it might be cosmology's "deadliest

blow to supernaturalism". That leaves the reader with the entirely wrong sense of having just ingested a polemic, rather than an excellent guide to the cutting edge of physics. Kraussdoesn't need Dawkins; a writer this good can speak for himself.

M ichael Br ooks is the author of Free Radicals: The secret anarchy of science (Profile,2011)