1. Comment #425816 by aquilacane on October 22, 2009 at 3:46 pm

Is there proof that the state called "nothing" can or has ever existed£ Is nothingness possible£

£ = question mark

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2. Comment #425819 by astronomer24 on October 22, 2009 at 3:51 pm

I wonder what was the question Krauss asked during Richard's talk was.

Also this lecture about about made me jizz my pants ha. So awesome. My sense of wonder, dulled over the last few years, has been renewed.

Im going to buy Atom by Krauss on amazon right now.

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3. Comment #425821 by nonsuch on October 22, 2009 at 4:03 pm

Any chance we could get an mp3 of this and the other AAI talks? Maybe they're already around but I can't find them.

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4. Comment #425827 by glenister_m on October 22, 2009 at 4:57 pm

I remember having a great AHA moment reading 'A Brief History of Time' where Stephen Hawking explained where all the matter and energy in the universe came from. Basically all that positive energy (matter plus energy) is precisely balanced by the negative energy of the expansion of the universe. ie. The grand total of all the positive and negative energy in the universe is zero.

Understanding a little quantum mechanics helps.

However it does sound a bit like Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Number of planets finite, size of the universe infinite, therefore population density of the universe zero, so anyone you happen to meet is the figment of a deranged imagination...

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5. Comment #425829 by beeline on October 22, 2009 at 5:01 pm

Very interesting - thanks for this.

Don't forget to set your white balance to 'Tungsten' next time, Josh! :-)

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6. Comment #425832 by Sally Luxmoore on October 22, 2009 at 5:15 pm

My poor mind.... Even the boggling has boggled.
How can anyone ever get to grips with all that?!
Fantastic, though.

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7. Comment #425835 by A on October 22, 2009 at 5:23 pm

White balance !!

Can 'nothing' be said to exist ?

"QT Download Coming Soon" - on a Mac/Safari simply go to the Youtube page - type &fmt=18 onto the end of the address - hit enter - and then you can download a high quality Quicktime by double clicking on the movie in the activity window.

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8. Comment #425837 by Josh Timonen on October 22, 2009 at 5:36 pm

beeline & A,
Color Temp set to 3200K. Tungsten. Indoors. The Red camera shoots RAW, so I can adjust it in color correction. Krauss is wearing yellow and brown, against a yellow wall, with a brown door behind him, and next to a brown podium. He's basically camouflaged! There's not a lot you can do in post for situations like this. And unfortunately these colors all make it look like I have the white balance set to around 5600K. I actually tried the color balance way down around 2400K (just to see if it might help), but there's still no separation. I could go on about the joys of filming in hotel ballrooms, but I will spare everyone.

Josh

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9. Comment #425838 by Sciros on October 22, 2009 at 5:46 pm

Josh, that's why next time you're filming an event like this, bring with you something like a "speaker's robe", and make it a very unusual color like neon pink. Everyone who presents has to wear a big pink robe and possibly a funny hat. Then you won't have to deal with situations like Krauss blending with the background.

That's my solution, anyway.

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10. Comment #425841 by GandalfGrey on October 22, 2009 at 6:19 pm

Wow, this stuff really boggles the mind.
Thanks a bunch to RDF for making it available to all!

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11. Comment #425844 by A on October 22, 2009 at 6:29 pm

@Josh - can't believe I am critiquing colour balance on video.

:)

. . . . but, here you go, this is how it looks to me - top image original frame grab - bottom 'yellow wash removed'.

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/913/32497242.jpg

Great video by the way - regardless my chromatic pedantry.

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12. Comment #425846 by Nekura on October 22, 2009 at 6:48 pm

Excellent video. I saw this same talk on Monday as part of the Quantum to Cosmos Festival.

http://www.q2cfestival.com/

There are lots more talks, on a variety of topics, including one on evolution, which should be available to view online soon. Upcoming ones are being streamed live, and most of the previous ones are already online.

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13. Comment #425847 by bluebird on October 22, 2009 at 7:01 pm

Loved this, thanks for posting! :)

The 'gravitational lens' photo he displayed was an APOD a few months ago - it's a beaut:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090823.html

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14. Comment #425848 by zeroangel on October 22, 2009 at 7:01 pm

That was really kewl. I learned some new things!

However, could someone please explain the following to me:

Near the end, it was mentioned that a new universe being formed will expand forever just like ours from the perspective of being inside that universe, but from outside it will shrink into a black hole (and presumably, radiate away). Why is that? Anyone know?

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15. Comment #425867 by Luis Dias on October 22, 2009 at 8:48 pm

Very kewl indeed. Thanks!

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16. Comment #425874 by curly on October 22, 2009 at 9:04 pm

Lawrence Krauss is so good at explaining complicated physics in layman terms. I love that we now have an answer for the "something can't come from nothing" argument.

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17. Comment #425891 by NewEnglandBob on October 22, 2009 at 10:01 pm

"Forget Jesus, stars died so you could be here today"

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18. Comment #425893 by yyy on October 22, 2009 at 10:04 pm

That registered really high on my interesting-o-meter. This site is awesome.

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19. Comment #425895 by Nastika on October 22, 2009 at 10:21 pm

00:54:51

Large hardon collider

LMAO

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20. Comment #425906 by chewedbarber on October 22, 2009 at 11:57 pm

An accessible and engaging talk. His delivery was excellent. Thanks for sharing.

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21. Comment #425912 by A on October 23, 2009 at 12:22 am

It might take me a number of years to parse the notion of 'nothing'.

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22. Comment #425927 by TurkishAtheist on October 23, 2009 at 12:54 am

I enjoyed my astrophysics class today :))

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23. Comment #425934 by Scot Rafkin on October 23, 2009 at 1:34 am

Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy Blog recently posted on the most distant galaxy ever observed. It's 10.2 billion light years away.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/10/22/cluster-tucked-at-the-far-reaches-of-the-universe/

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24. Comment #425939 by Spinoza on October 23, 2009 at 1:56 am

Ex nihilo nihil fit. :)

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25. Comment #425940 by Tack on October 23, 2009 at 1:59 am

I just saw Dr. Krauss give a talk at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario on Monday. It was very polished and he's a great speaker. (For those interested in the talk, it can be downloaded at http://perimeterinstitute.media.streamtheworld.com/video/life_the_universe_895451.mp4)

Afterward he was doing booksigning at a tiny, crowded bookstore at the theater. Just as he sat down ready to begin, he wondered aloud if anyone had any scotch handy. I said, "Ah if you were Christopher Hitchens, I'd have come prepared." He was very personable and gracious with his time, and I didn't feel rushed at all.

I commented that I really enjoyed the unmoderated, relaxed discussion between him and Dawkins at Stanford earlier this year. He agreed that format worked really well and said that more events like that would be in the works.

Overall just a great experience meeting him. Like Richard, he's a very easy man to respect.

Thought I'd share. :)

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26. Comment #425944 by wbreim on October 23, 2009 at 2:31 am

well. As Dawkins pointed out it IS a shame that not more students are going into physics but it's not surprising given that the route for a physics undergrad in america is
4 years BA (hard) cost: $50,000-70,000
7 years for PhD (very hard) earning $18,000-22,000/yr a year IF you get an RA or TA position right away.
2 years post doc (very very hard) earning $40,000/yr
Faculty position maybe (very very very hard to get)
Tenure track if you're lucky 10 years after that you will be making $70,000-90,000

I am a physics major myself I can't think of these number too much or it scares me a little.

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27. Comment #425956 by glenister_m on October 23, 2009 at 5:07 am

I believe the effect that a new universe grows geometrically to those inside and shrinks into a black hole to those outside, has to do with essentially a black hole being infinitely deep.

So if you use the analogy as space as an elastic sheet, the new universe forms underneath the sheet and pulls down and out. From the top of the sheet we see a gravity well that gets deeper and deeper and forms black hole. Space continues to stretch into that hole deeper and deeper. From below the sheet material can balloon out further and further as it expands into a new universe.

It sort of makes sense to me, but if there are any physicists who wish to correct my assumptions or analogy I'd be happy to hear from them.

Does that mean every black hole is forming a new universe? If you could survive passing through the event horizon, you would then be vapourized by all the radiation that had fallen into the black hole and was stuck trying to leave at the speed of light. (That would probably be equivalent to the big bang/CBM of our universe) It would also prevent travel between universes.

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28. Comment #425965 by LDmiller on October 23, 2009 at 6:26 am

The odd thing about Krauss's talk is that there are a lot of perfectly respectable cosmologists who would not agree with a single thing he said, using the same sets of evidence.

When you get right down to it, his whole theory is based on:

1) Assuming that the red shift of distant galaxies is due to Doppler effect. (There are other phenomena such as Minkowski spacetime that explain it just as well.)

2) In order to support his non-collapsing (flat) universe he has to postulate Dark Energy and Dark Matter, for which there is no direct experimental evidence at all. And he has positioned himself so that failure of the LHC to produce any will not embarrass him. Locked and loaded.

He talks glibly about all of this as though it were settled science, not open to other interpretations, nor to be questioned (at least he did not show any disclaimers in this talk) ins spite of the sparseness or even non-existence of observational evidence to back him up.

We have a word for that: RELIGION.

And I have no doubt that Richard Dawkins would defend him to the death out of friendship.

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29. Comment #425967 by Cents on October 23, 2009 at 6:33 am

Re the Comment#425956 by glenister_m

What you wrote is what I was thinking as well. Dr,. Krauss was referring to how it would look to us (matter disappearing into a Black hole which would be into an invisible space) and coming out into a newly created universe would appear to be an explosion/expansion of energy from the material that went to the black hole from an postulated observer in the new universe (re the Big Bang). As a result travel through Black holes would appear to be wishful thinking for time travelers via these "wormholes".

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30. Comment #425970 by Jos Gibbons on October 23, 2009 at 7:04 am

Comment #425965 by LDmiller

(1) Name one perfectly respectable cosmologist who doesn't think Hubble's law is the correct explanation of galaxy redshifts.
(2) LK spent much of the talk providing exactly the evidence for dark energy/matter you're claiming he doesn't have. We predicted there would be invisible mass in the clusters. Done. We predicted there would be exactly the right amount of dark energy for the total energy to be 0, for very good physical reasons - hence, the cosmological constant would have the value associated with that amount. Done.
(3) If the LHC doesn't produce dark matter or dark energy, then they just have high rest masses, or are improbable to form (as gravitons are because of the associated weak cross sections). LK knows we have to look for evidence wherever we can find it, hence (2).
(4) RD tells off LK for not being sufficiently anti-religion, as was mentioned in the intro. Their friendship doesn't lead to the outcome you expect.

Empirical fail.

Other Comments by Jos Gibbons

31. Comment #425974 by LDmiller on October 23, 2009 at 7:44 am

Comment #425970 by Jos Gibbons

(1) I believe that Stephen Weinberg would disagree with much of it.

Remember that Hubble's Law was an uncredited rip-off of the prior work of LeMaitre, which Krauss actually has the chutzpah to (mis)quote. And LeMaitre WAS trying to prove the literal truth of Genesis at the time he met Hubble. His recantation (also quoted by Krauss) was much later, after Hubble had made LeMaitre's uncredited work famous.

You look at galactic red shift and see Doppler effect. I look at it and see multi-dimensional spacetime. The Sloan Deep Space Survey data supports my interpretation. It does not support yours, by orders of magnitude. As our instrumentation improves, Big Bang is showing big, ragged holes. That does not make it not true, but it certainly removes much of the smug certainty you display.

(2), (3) You are taking statements or assertions as settled fact.

Krauss admitted in the talk that we know absolutely nothing about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, other than as a patch to support the thesis that total energy is 0 and that the gravitational red shift is due to Doppler effect. That is not evidence, it is a mathematical contrivance.

(4) I don't know about that. I don't think Krauss is an atheist; I think he is a Kraussian.

My point was that charges of scientists having a Science Religion are often true. Behold this example.

Other Comments by LDmiller

32. Comment #425980 by Jos Gibbons on October 23, 2009 at 8:09 am

Comment #425974 by LDmiller

(1)
(a) Considering that the sole reference to Weinberg in the Hubble's law article on Wikipedia is him as the author of an article calculating the Hubble constant, it's fair to say he does believe in it after all. See also http://is.gd/4xarC for Weinberg agreeing with the something-from-nothing idea too. If you disagree with my reading of Weinberg, feel free to provide a source where Weinberg questions Hubble's law, something from nothing, or whatever it is you think he doubts that LK is advocating. Once I've seen that, I'll be interested in his reasons for objecting to what LK says.
(b) Why do you bring up how the law was concocted? I don't really care after whom it should be named, or what the motives were; I care about whether the evidence supports the idea.
(c) I tried to look up the Sloan Deep Space Survey to see what you're talking about. I'm a little low on time ATM so I only checked Wikipedia. It gave me a slightly different name - did you mean the Sloan Digital Sky Survey? Because the article for that didn't reference Hubble's law, while the redshifts it quoted don't even differ by 1 order of magnitude. I'd be fascinated to see if whatever you were talking about delivers what you say it does, but you'll have to help me find it.

(2)/(3) - I'm looking at the evidence. (2) was predictive. (3) is just you complaining about NOT finding evidence of a certain type. (Maybe we will with the LHC, maybe not - how powerful an accelerator will we need? We don't know.) If you're trying to learn more about the particle zoo, the approach in (3) is good, provided it works. But in the mean time, we can learn something. The numbers were 0.3 and 0.7, not 0.3 and 0.8, or 0.4 and 0.3 and 0.6. What's more, the sum is known even more accurately - to /- 1%. Maybe more work needs to be done, but to call them "statements or assertions" ignores the fact that it's empirical.

(4) If LK isn't an atheist either, then that means he disagrees with RD even more. You alleged in (4) in your original post that Krauss's work is religious insofar as he presents certain conclusions as settled in the absence of supporting evidence, and that RD's friendship will cause RD to defend LK. But RD openly objects to LK on at least one key issue, and their friendship has there not counted for jack; so, in any areas where RD *doesn't* object to LK, what evidence is there that their friendship is responsible (or partly responsible) for such amicability?

Other Comments by Jos Gibbons

33. Comment #425982 by beeline on October 23, 2009 at 8:15 am

@A (#11)

Thanks for that - exactly what I was going to do.

@Josh,

Yes, you can shoot RAW, and it certainly saves a lot of kerfuffle and guesswork during the actual shooting, but this leads to other problems that need to be compensated for in post production.

If you set up the correct temperature (using grey cards, or whatever method works best for you) then you will get the maximum possible contrast ratio for the colours that are present. If you're off by a thousand K or so, the resulting colours will look flat and dull (and usually quite dark) UNLESS you also remember to adjust the light curves in post, as well as the temperature.

It's the same with digital photography (my area) - the more you get right to start with, the less work you have to (remember to) do at the end, and the less colour and contrast information you'll lose in post.

This is, you understand, a very minor quibble in your otherwise excellent work. :-)

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34. Comment #425983 by epeeist on October 23, 2009 at 8:26 am

Comment #425980 by Jos Gibbons:

(1)

Jos - having slight difficulties with numbering in your posts. You can use the HTML list tags, i.e. "< ol >" to start a numbered list or "< ol type='a' >" for an alphabetically labelled list. You obviously need "< /ol >" to end it. The list items are enclosed in "< li > ... < /li >" tags.

Leave out the spaces that I have inserted to avoid the site munging the tags.

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35. Comment #425985 by Jos Gibbons on October 23, 2009 at 8:38 am

Comment #425983 by epeeist

Are you unable to see the numbers? I deliberately didn't format them, (i) for convenience for me (yes, I'm lazy), (ii) because it makes mentioning them inline easier later. I can see them after posting them, but maybe that's because they're my posts. If you're less fortunate, I'll use the tags instead.

Other Comments by Jos Gibbons

36. Comment #425991 by epeeist on October 23, 2009 at 9:18 am

Comment #425985 by Jos Gibbons:

Are you unable to see the numbers?

Yes, I can see the numbers. Just that I am a typographic snob, troff and TeX were the original documentation tools I used.

To be slightly less tongue in cheek, without the formatting your posts are not as readable as they could be. Accessibility and usability are the things I specialise in these days.

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37. Comment #426052 by robotaholic on October 23, 2009 at 2:33 pm

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most scientists who say the red shift is not evidence of cosmic expansion like a fringe group that no one takes seriously?

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38. Comment #426071 by PERSON on October 23, 2009 at 3:01 pm

Perhaps someone should make a video about why cranks reflexively accuse people with established opinions of being religious. It's problematic for various reasons.

1. It gives baseless credibility to religions by giving them the same status as established views
2. Members of small cults are religious as much or typically more than members of large ones
3. It implies a need to bolster a weak case

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39. Comment #426083 by Sciros on October 23, 2009 at 3:34 pm

LDmiller

You look at galactic red shift and see Doppler effect. I look at it and see multi-dimensional spacetime. The Sloan Deep Space Survey data supports my interpretation. It does not support yours, by orders of magnitude. As our instrumentation improves, Big Bang is showing big, ragged holes. That does not make it not true, but it certainly removes much of the smug certainty you display.

From http://www.sdss.org/background/science.html:

The light coming to us from these distant objects is shifted toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, in much the same way the sound of a train whistle changes as a train leaves a station, compared to the way the pitch is perceived when the train is in the station. The faster a distant object is moving, the more it is redshifted. Astronomers measure the amount of redshift in the spectrum of a galaxy to figure out how far away it is from us.

By measuring the redshift of a million galaxies, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is creating a three-dimensional picture of our local neighborhood of the universe.

:-P

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40. Comment #426111 by locutus7 on October 23, 2009 at 4:56 pm

On a more mundane note, anyone know what that cool lapel pin he is wearing represents? Is it an atheist pin of some sort?

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41. Comment #426127 by LWS on October 23, 2009 at 5:44 pm

Thanks Josh & Mike for working tirelessly over the AAI-09 weekend to record the fantastic lectures sponsored by RDF. Posting the talks here provides everyone the opportunity to see/hear what we in the live audience did. Making beautiful images under such difficult lighting conditions is always a challenge. The audio is superb and that's what counts.

If you think Krauss' talk is confusing then do check out even more complex thoughts in this wonderful video from the Quantum to Cosmos Festival hosted by the Perimeter Instutute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario. http://q2cfestival.com/

The Quantum Tamers: http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Outreach/Quantum_Tamers/The_Quantum_Tamers/

I wish Richard Dawkins wasn't so down on those of us who opted for Media Studies instead of Physics. The programme that I graduated from had requirements for sociology, psychology, perception and expression. Each of those disciplines is important in forming ideas about the world too.

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42. Comment #426172 by s1mon on October 23, 2009 at 7:58 pm

Great talk.

It makes you realize how little we know.

Interesting how beings of 100 billion years from now would see a very 'different' universe and come to different conclusions!


Also, looks like LK isn't a big fan of String theory.

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43. Comment #426262 by Alternative Carpark on October 24, 2009 at 5:44 am

I was never a big fan of Dr. Krauss before; consider me converted.

Wonderful stuff!

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44. Comment #426285 by Mark Smith on October 24, 2009 at 10:57 am

Thoroughly enjoyable and educational.

He said the LHC is being switched on again soon. Does anybody know when, and does that mean it has been fully repaired now?

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45. Comment #426292 by Follow Peter Egan on October 24, 2009 at 12:43 pm

Wow, that was brilliant. I'm no physicist and didn't really understand much of what was said but I was glued to this lecture. Krauss has a brilliant way of conveying his subject with enthusiasm.

Wonderful stuff. And the digs at religion made me chortle too.

I'll be putting his books on my xmas list. Anyone know if he's as entertaining and lucid in print as he is in person?

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46. Comment #426323 by Stephen Maxwell on October 24, 2009 at 3:57 pm

"Forget Jesus, those stars died so that we could be here..."

Haha, that gave me a good laugh. After watching this, Krauss joins Sagan and Neil Tyson on my fantasy dinner party wish-list. :P

Other Comments by Stephen Maxwell

47. Comment #426373 by TurkishAtheist on October 24, 2009 at 7:53 pm

Flat universe is just a theory I understand it even though Mr. Krauss spoke as if it was a fact but, it is not agreed upon by all scientists, so I am not convinced what all said here. Universe could very well be infinite to any direction like a balloon. This may not be solved ever, that's unknown.

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48. Comment #426377 by SaintStephen on October 24, 2009 at 8:06 pm

47. Comment #426373 by TurkishAtheist on October 24, 2009 at 7:53 pm

"Flat" does not imply planar in a Euclidean sense, if that's what you think Krauss meant. The material universe is indeed expanding in 3 dimensions, unless Jos Gibbons corrects me.

Other Comments by SaintStephen

49. Comment #426441 by HappyPrimate on October 25, 2009 at 3:19 am

Absolutely awesome talk by LK. While I am not nearly educated enough to understand every aspect of what he said, I feel I got a fair understanding of what he was putting forth. The comments here were interesting and all I'd say about it is that both RD and LK would change their minds in a nanosecond if evidence to the contrary was ever presented. That's the difference between science and religion. Find the evidence and prove them wrong. That's what every scientist lives for and why we need more of them. They want to know the truth and so do I. I dearly wish I hadn't been turned away from science in high school but living in the deep south in the 1960s, females were pushed into more domestic roles. I was actually told by my science teacher I should be ashamed to strive toward a career in science as I would be taking away a career place for a man. I was not allowed to even take physics in high school because I was a female. So happy things have changed, but not enough. I had to pursue my science education on my own by personal reading. That's one reason I value this website so much. It allows me to learn more about science. I feel so sorry for those people walking around on this planet that have no idea that they exist because of stars exploding, that we all are star stuff. Awesome!

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50. Comment #426469 by SaintStephen on October 25, 2009 at 8:48 am

49. Comment #426441 by HappyPrimate on October 25, 2009 at 3:19 am

I feel so sorry for those people walking around on this planet that have no idea that they exist because of stars exploding, that we all are star stuff.

I had a blind date in 1993 with a 20-something year old woman who didn't know what the stars were. Yes, she literally didn't know what those "shiny dust motes" in the sky were. (That's her description btw: shiny dust motes.)

Yes, it was one of those classic blind date moments. After I recovered from my shock I told her I felt privileged to inform her that they were stars just like our sun. Her reaction was to utter something like "Oh."

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