Tratando de hacer un universo desde la

nada
Trying to make the cosmos out of nothing

11 January 2012 by Michael Brooks

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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 in
California. During his time there he gave a talk on his latest idea - that empty space might
contain 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 who
showed that the universe is expanding ever faster, Perlmutter had defeated his own instincts
and 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 is
an exemplary interpreter of tough science, and the central part of the book, where he
discusses 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, general
relativity was a work in progress and only a few scientists believed there was a beginning to
the universe. We have come a long, long way since then by developing scientific tools that
have proved themselves both reliable and remarkably fruitful. As Krauss's insightful book
shows, these days we really can talk with scientific rigour about the history and even the
prehistoric origins of our universe.

Yet despite its clear strengths, A Universe From Nothing is not quite, as Richard Dawkins
hopefully declares in the afterword, a "knockout blow" for the idea that a deity must have
kicked 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 necessary
or required". Ultimately, though, he has to perform a little sleight of hand. Space and time
can indeed come from nothing; nothing, as Krauss explains beautifully, being an extremely
unstable 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 is
that they arise from our existence within a multiverse, where all the universes have their
own laws - ours being just so for no particular reason.
Krauss contends that the multiverse makes the question of what determined our laws of
nature "less significant". Truthfully, it just puts the question beyond science - for now, at
least. That (together with the frustratingly opaque origins of a multiverse) means Krauss
can't quite knock out those who think there must ultimately be a prime mover. Not that this
matters too much: the juvenile asides that litter the first third of the book (for example, "I
am tempted to retort here that theologians are expert at nothing") mean that, by the time we
get 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 said
about the Dawkins afterword, which is both superfluous and silly. A Universe From
Nothing is a great book: readable, informative and topical. Inexplicably, though, Dawkins
compares 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. Krauss
doesn't need Dawkins; a writer this good can speak for himself.
Michael Brooks is the author of Free Radicals: The secret anarchy of science (Profile,
2011)