Book review: „A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING“ by Lawrence Krauss

Normally I don`t do any reviews on the books I read, but because this one is related to what this channel is about, I`ll be expressing the thoughts and ideas I got while reading it.

Before I start talking about the book itself, here is his talk about the same subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

The book itself is written after that conference as an extension. I saw the conference before reading the book and did not find it informative enough. Indeed, the book is much more elaborative when it comes to the actual subject.

The first thing you might notice about the book is its controversial name, which is, no doubt, purposely written in all caps in order to give nightmares to any philosopher who might unsuspectingly glance at it. As the readers of this no doubt know, philosophy has gotten unwarranted authority over questions about the Universe and continues to poke its nose in what is actually the field of science to this day. Lawrence rightfully dismisses philosophers and theologians who you might hear dogmatically repeating „something can`t come from nothing!“ in the preface of his book. Later towards the end of the book he goes back to the beginning, summing up why he did so:

One thing is certain, however. The metaphysical „rule“, which is held as an ironclad conviction by those with whom I have debated the issue of creation, namely that „out of nothing nothing comes“, has no foundation in science. Arguing that it is self-evident, unvawering, and unassailable is like arguing, as Darwin falsely did, when he made the suggestion that the origin of life was beyond the domain of science by building an analogy with the incorrect claim that matter cannot be created or destroyed. All it represents is an unwillingness to recognize the simple fact that nature may be cleverer than philosophers or theologians.

-Lawrence Krauss

With such things out of the window, Lawrence gives us an overview of some important scientifical discoveries which you probably already have heard of. I myself have gotten many bits and pieces from watching many documentaries at a certain stage of my life so most of it was not very new to me, but I guess it is necessary for those who just picked up the book without any prior knowledge of the history of science.

It also served a second purpose – to lead us up to the question of how our Universe is shaped. Three options.

With information obtained from BOOMERaNG and a NASA project which provided a more accurate result than the aforementioned Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics, he deducts that the Universe, according to the data available us, looks flat. Now I get the feeling that everyone reading his book might not agree. I remember meeting a physicist a year ago, according to whom we are living in a closed Universe. That is perhaps half the truth and Lawrence elaborates more on this later in the book.

Having done that, he goes on talking about virtual particles and how they can permeate empty space. At this point of the book you might be thinking that he likes to go from one irrevelant subject to another and this is not really leading up to the big question and the reason you started reading in the first place. It all comes together when you reach over a 100 pages.

You are probably wondering as to what you will find there. I am nowhere near as fluent and lack the knowledge, charm and eloquency to describe in a few words what Lawrence needed an entire book for, but I`ll try to atleast give you an idea of what you can expect.

Dark energy. Virtual particles traveling back and forth in spacetime, allowing a real particle to jump in timespace. They`re everywhere, even in empty space. Quantum mechanics. Inflation. A Universe out of nothing.  

Did you understand anything? Thought not. So if you really want to, read the book.

I sometimes found myself re-reading paragraphs in order to understand what exactly I had just read. While I was well in my comfort zone in the first chapters of the book, Lawrence had certainly kicked things up a notch. Perhaps I was not yet entirely ready to digest all of the information, but atleast I got an idea what he was saying.

To this point, aside from the preface, there was no mention of God. However what he wrote is easy to misunderstand if only the reader has a certain bias. I doubt such a situation would happen, as the book is most heretic just by the title and even more blasphemous in its content when looked at from a less scientific perspective. Yet if someone like that would persist, it would be easy to point at several things and say: „Look, God did that!“. Lawrence counteracts this as explaining at nearly every possible opportunity why one should not assume too much about the things he says. While it seems a bit redundant, I do not blame him for doing so as people in the past have fallen victim when they express themselves in a way that you could understand both ways. Here`s a great example:

"God does not play dice." - Albert Einstein

This is very well-known and can be interpreted in more than one way. Superficially, it looks exactly like he is talking about God and a pair of dice. And ofcourse, he is talking about my God, because Einstein is too smart to be worshipping Zeus or someone else. But here`s another quote.

Did God have a choice in creating the Universe? - Albert Einstein

Okay, so now the average believer of an omnipotent God might find himself in a bit of a disagreement with what he said, but the point is Einstein still talked of God as if he believed in him.

Einstein himself probably noticed that people were understanding things he said differently and decided to say the following...

"It was, ofcourse, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Albert Einstein

You can draw your conclusions about what he was talking about when invoking God from that quote, but many people today look at the first quote and think that this guy was really talking about a God of some religion. The reason I am mentioning this in this review is that those words were in vain. And so it will be when it comes to Lawrence. He can write an afterword to every chapter where the more religious reader may misunderstand the implications of what he wrote, but you can be sure that someone will come along and only quote the parts he finds personally appealing and ignore what comes after. The preface should have sufficed, as it already threw God out of the window.

In the last chapters of the book, when Lawrence is not beating religion away with a stick, he expands on how exactly empty space could have came about and how it brought about everything else. He also talks about quantum mechanics and a theoretical Universe popping into existence while maintaining zero energy as a whole by being closed, then slowly changing its shape into flat through inflation. I feel as though the first part of the book had more observational evidence to support it while he left mathematics, quantum physics and implications towards the end.

All in all, this book was worth reading (for me). It doesn`t replace a textbook, so you won`t become a whole lot smarter after you`ve read it and it also assumes that you`re not hearing about physics the first time in your life. If you haven`t, then I wouldn`t suggest it. If you`re interested in these kinds of things, go ahead and read it.