rationalskepticism.org

Teuton wrote:Reviews of Krauss's book:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books ... .html?_r=1

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4754

Lawrence Krauss wrote:... It is not lost on me that the goal posts have changed..I was honest about this.. my point is that the question of ‘nothing’ is one that needs to be explored from a scientific perspective.. and when one does so, the whole meaning of the question becomes less important.. nothing is not so simple anymore.. and moreover, the claims that I define nothing to be the quantum vacuum is something I keep reading in some of these reviews, but that is disingenuous. I carefully tried, in 3 steps, to progressively explore different versions of what one might operationally call nothing from a physicists perspective.. The first version is indeed the empty vacuum of space–the eternal void of the bible if you wish. Such a version of nothing can quickly be dispensed with as easily leading to something, and not really that different from something.. as I point out. ( and for some reason this bothers some people who think it shouldn’t be so..) But then I talk about how the complete absence of space itself, of our universe, can lead to the creation of space.. our universe.. when quantum gravitational considerations are included…. Now, in this case, there may be ‘something’..perhaps an eternal multiverse out of which our universe may arise.. but in no sense did OUR universe, or OUR vacuum state in our universe, exist before such spontaneous creation may occur.. Finally I point out that the laws of physics themselves may be unique to our universe. (It is true as I point out that quantum mechanics itself may be common to all universes or not.. I have no idea.. but that is not the point..it is a side issue).

I made the point somewhere in the book that when one considers these things the question why is there something rather than nothing (where we live to ask the question) is like asking why some flowers are blue and others red.. it may not be a fundamentally interesting question from a scientific perspective.. That may be disappointing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be true.. If it is a bait and switch that is because science as done the switching.. I may not be focusing on the classical question that has bother philosophers, but I don’t think I ever claim to.. I am more interested in the questions of the real universe…

Moreover, the point of the book is to carefully show that the characteristics of our universe are more or less precisely those characteristics of a universe that could spontaneously arise and evolve by physical, and not supernatural causes.. and that didn’t have to be the case! I think that alone is worth celebrating, and explaining, and with all due respect, having read the literature, I don’t think that has been described carefully and knowledgably (with both the particle physics and cosmological issues treated) and in an up to date fashion in the public literature before..

And finally, without the pretense that it may appear that this sentence, I do think in spirit that what it does is similar to what Darwin’s book tried to do.. albeit I agree without being the monumental piece of new exploratory science that his masterpiece uniquely was in the history of science.. it simply tries to plausibly understand how the diverse and wonderful universe we see, which appears naively to be designed, can arise by purely physical processes that might be both understood and predictive….

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