Just Finished Reading: A Universe from Nothing – Why is there Something rather than Nothing by Lawrence M Krauss (FP: 2012)

I have always believed that the Universe is a natural phenomenon which came into existence, through completely natural processes, some 13.7 billion years ago. Over the years I have, occasionally, dabbled in the science of such things to flesh out my belief with some facts. This book was another part of the effort to get my head around the whole thing. Whilst not completely effective – much more my fault than the authors – I am now a little closer to my goal of appreciating the science behind the existence of the Universe if not exactly fully understanding it. I am the first to admit that I am not a scientist. My formal education over the years has, by and large, been in the Humanities and that’s where I feel most at home. However I have developed, mostly through reading and some excellent TV documentaries a deepening interest in biological Evolution, Cosmology and Quantum Mechanics. This book brought together two of those subjects – Cosmology & QM.

Most of us have by now heard of Dark Matter. It is an idea conceived to explain why the Universe is behaving in the way it does. Essentially, according to present theories, there isn’t enough visible matter in the Universe to explain why it’s continuing to expand after the Big Bang and looks like it’ll expand forever so not Big Crunch when it all comes back. But weirdly (and to be honest most of the ideas discussed in this book can easily be labelled ‘weird’) not only is the Universe continuing to expand but the expansion is actually accelerating. Yes, that’s right. Accelerating. Pretty soon – in cosmic terms – we’ll no longer to be able to see the furthest galaxies and stars because they’ll be accelerating away from our area of space faster than the speed of light. Told you it was weird… The cause, the driving force of this expansion? More weirdness – Dark Energy. All space – even the empty space between stars and between galaxies is literally frothing with energy at a quantum level. Not only that, at intervals too small to measure, things like electrons spontaneously pop into existence and just as quickly pop out again and this is happening all the time. Going a little deeper down the rabbit hole it’s not only matter that seemingly spontaneously generates itself – its space too in the form of a rapid expansion. Mostly this occurs in vanishing small timeframes followed by an equally rapid deflation. But sometimes the expansion goes on into measurable time periods – like 13.7 billion years. Yes, just like our Universe and, it seems, like others too. Weird enough yet? Because there’s just one more thing – not only do the observations of our Universe say that spontaneous generation of entire Universes could happen or even do happen but, as far as the observations seem to be indicating and backed up by very sophisticated and verified mathematics, that this sort of thing *has* to happen and is happening right now. Because of the nature of QM exhibited in Dark Energy entire Universes are coming into existence in other parts of our Universe, in effect ‘budding off’ multiple Universes that, given the right physical constraints may well be very similar to this one. OK, that’s weird enough I think.

Although some of this book clearly flew over my head – I did struggle at times to work my way through the logic of it all – I did ‘get’ enough of it to appreciate how far our understanding of Universe creation has come since the idea of the Big Bang first made scientific headlines. Clearly I need to keep reading about both QM and Cosmology to get my head around the difficult stuff so there will be more in both areas (and, naturally, in Evolution too) to come. I seriously doubt that I’ll ever understand the maths behind any of this and I’ll probably never understand the intricacies of QM (I mean, who does?) but I do hope that I’ll be able to deepen (and widen?) my appreciation of both subjects so I at least get the gist of what they’re talking about. Recommended if you fancy something weird, cool and reasonably difficult to get you head around.