By SAMANTHA NELSON - A.V. CLUB
Added: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:30:43 UTC

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In 2009, the Richard Dawkins Foundation posted a video of a Lawrence M. Krauss lecture on YouTube. His discussion of how science says God wasn’t necessary for the creation of the universe racked up more than a million hits and inspired Krauss to expand it into a book. Unfortunately, the concepts he explores are so complex, and filled with so many factors that top physicists and cosmologists don’t understand, expanding on them in print actually makes them more confusing.

With an afterward by Richard Dawkins, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing is solidly in the New Atheism camp, a cosmologist’s version of Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker. Krauss takes several jabs at theologians who insist on fitting science into their preconceived notions of how the universe should work, when they aren’t ignoring science altogether.

Krauss is a veteran science writer with an extensive bibliography, and he does a commendable job of providing groundwork for cosmology novices on how scientists are able to measure things like the universe’s age, mass, and energy. The problem is how little is still known about his subject matter. Scientists have discovered that most of the energy in the universe is contained in empty space, a force counteracting gravity that will eventually push everything in the universe apart. But why this is the case is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. The inflation of the universe isn’t just expanding our universe, but is likely responsible for creating a multitude of universes that we can’t see. Accounting for that, Krauss’ thesis is that anything that isn’t impossible has happened somewhere—including the generation of a universe with stars, planets, and people, where nothing existed before.

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TAGGED: BOOKS, LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS, PHYSICS, REVIEWS, SPACE