I watched a conversation recently between journalist Robert Wright and physicist Lawrence Krauss on “the origins of the universe, quantum weirdness and the limits of scientific knowledge,” according to an announcement from event host Union Theological Seminary.
Although the event featured lots of witty banter, it ended up being more frustrating than fun. Wright asked Krauss to clarify his positions on religion, philosophy and science, and Krauss kept demanding that Wright define his terms. What does he mean by “New Atheism”? “Scientism”? “Proselytize”? “Imponderable”?
When Wright tried to lay out objections to Krauss’s 2012 book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, Krauss interrupted him with a rambling disquisition on the meaning of “nothing.” Wright, exasperated, blurted out, “People are going to leave tonight without knowing what the criticism of your book is if you continue to filibuster!”
Since Krauss can’t interrupt me, let me spell out some objections to his book. I’ll start with mine. Here’s what I said about Krauss’s book three years ago:
“Decades ago, physicists such as the legendary John Wheeler proposed that, according to the probabilistic dictates of quantum field theory, even an apparently perfect vacuum seethes with particles and antiparticles popping into and out of existence. In 1990, the Russian physicist Andrei Linde assured me that our entire cosmos—as well as an infinite number of other universes—might have sprung from a primordial ‘quantum fluctuation.’
“I took this notion—and I think Linde presented it—as a bit of mind-titillating whimsy. But Krauss asks us to take the quantum theory of creation seriously, and so does evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. ‘Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages,’ Dawkins writes in an afterword to Krauss’s book. ‘If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.’ Whaaaa…??!! Dawkins is comparing the most enduringly profound scientific treatise in history to a pop-science book that recycles a bunch of stale ideas from physics and cosmology.”
But what do I know? Like Robert Wright, I’m just a journalist. So let’s see what philosopher David Albert, who has a doctorate in physics, said about Krauss’s book in The New York Times:
“The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on–and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.”
Krauss has dismissed Albert as a “moronic philosopher” who misunderstood his book. Krauss told me after his conversation with Wright that no real physicist has voiced objections to his book. That brings me to physicist George Ellis. When I interviewed Ellis last year, I asked him if Krauss’s book answers the question posed by its subtitle. Ellis responded:
“Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.”
When I mentioned Ellis’s critique, Krauss claimed that Ellis, although once a physicist, is now a “theologian.” Ellis, a Quaker, has indeed written about religion, among other topics, but he is renowned for his work in physics. He co-wrote with Stephen Hawking the classic 1973 work The Large-Scale Structure of Spacetime. Just in the past five years, Ellis, now 76, has edited one book on quantum gravity and co-written another on cosmology and has co-written more than a dozen papers on physics, according to his website.
If Ellis isn’t a physicist, Krauss isn’t either, according to his own criterion. So what is he? Ellis describes A Universe From Nothing as a “kind of attempt at philosophy.” The sophistry and terminological quibbling that Krauss displayed during his conversation with Wright was reminiscent of philosophy at its worst. Krauss, perhaps, is just a bad philosopher.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
