continue independently of whether we exist or not. For this reason I
am strangely attracted to the doomsday scenario I have just
described. In this case, the remarkable accident that is responsible
for our existence—the condensation of a field that allows the current
stability of matter, atoms, and life itself—is seen as a short-term bit
of good luck.
The imaginary scientists living on the spine of an ice crystal on
the windowpane that I described earlier would first discover that one
direction in their universe was particularly special (which would no
doubt be celebrated by the theologians in such a society as an
example of God’s love). Digging deeper, they might discover that this
special circumstance is just an accident and that other ice crystals
can exist in which other directions are favored.
And so, we too have discovered that our universe, with its forces
and particles and amazing Standard Model that results in the
remarkable good fortune of an expanding universe with stars and
planets and life that can evolve a consciousness, is also a simple
accident made possible because the Higgs field condensed in just the
way it did as the universe evolved early on.
And even as the imaginary scientists on the hypothetical ice
crystal might celebrate their discoveries as we are wont to do, they
might also be unaware that the Sun is about to rise and that soon
their ice crystal will melt, and all traces of their brief existence will
disappear. Would this have made the thrill of their brief existence
less enthralling? Certainly not. If our future is similarly fleeting, we
can at least enjoy the wild ride we have taken and relish every aspect
of the greatest story ever told . . . so far.
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E p i l o g u e
C O S M I C H U M I L I T Y
For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
—GENESIS 3:19
“These are the tears of things, and the stuff of our mortality
cuts us to the heart.”
So said Virgil as he penned the first great epic story of the classical
era. They are the words I chose to use as the epigraph of this book
because the story I wanted to tell not only contains every bit as much
drama, human tragedy, and exaltation, but it is ultimately motivated
by a similar purpose.
Why do we do science? Surely it is in part so that we can have
greater control of our environment. By understanding the universe
better we can predict the future with greater accuracy, and we can
build devices that might change the future—hopefully for the better.
But ultimately I believe we are driven to do science because of a
primal urge we have to better understand our origins, our mortality,
and ultimately ourselves. We are hardwired to survive by solving
puzzles, and that evolutionary advantage has, over time, allowed us
the luxury of wanting to solve puzzles of all sorts—even those less
pressing than how to find food or to escape from a lion. What puzzle
is more seductive than the puzzle of our universe?
Humanity didn’t have a choice in its evolution. We find ourselves
alive on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old in a galaxy that is 12
billion years old, in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe with at least a
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hundred billion galaxies that is expanding ever faster into a future we
cannot yet predict.
So what do we do with this information? Is there special
significance here for understanding our human story? In the midst of
this cosmic grandeur and tragedy, how can we reconcile our own
existence?
For most people, the central questions of existence ultimately
come down to transcendental ones: Why is there a universe at all?
Why are we here?
Whatever presumptions one might bring to the question “Why?,”
if we understand the “how” better, “why” will come into sharper
focus. I wrote my last book to address what science has to say about
the first of the above questions. The story I have related here
provides what I think is the best answer to the second.
Faced with the mystery of our existence, we have two choices. We
can assume we have special significance and that somehow the
universe was made for us. For many, this is the most comfortable
choice. It was the choice made by early human tribes, who
anthropomorphized nature because it provided them some hope of
understanding what otherwise seemed to be a hostile world often
centered on suffering and death. It is the choice made by almost all
the world’s religions, each of which has its own claimed solution to
the quandary of existence.
This choice of which tale to embrace has led to one culture’s
sacred book, the New Testament, which has sometimes been called
“the greatest story ever told”—the story of that civilization’s putative
discovery of its own divinity. Yet when I witness wars and killing
based on which prayers we are supposed to recite, which persons we
are supposed to marry, or which prophet is the appropriate one to
follow, I cannot help but be reminded, once again, of Gulliver, who
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discovered societies warring over which way God had intended man
to break an egg.
The second choice when addressing these transcendental
mysteries is to make no assumption in advance about the answer.
Which leads to another story. One that I think is more humble. In
this story we evolve in a universe whose laws exist independently of
our own being. In this story we check the details to see if they might
be wrong. In this story we are going to be surprised at every turn.
The story I have written here describes a human drama as much
as a universal one. It describes the boldest intellectual quest humans
have ever undertaken. It even has scriptural allegories, for those who
prefer them. We wandered in the desert for forty years after the
development of the Standard Model before we discovered the
Promised Land. The truth, or at least as much of the truth as we now
know, was revealed to us in what for most people seems to be
incomprehensible scribbles: the mathematics of gauge theories.
These have not been delivered to us on golden tablets by an angel,
but rather by much more practical means: on pieces of paper in
laboratory notebooks filled through the hard work of a legion of
individuals who knew that their claims could be tested by whether
they correctly modeled the real world, the world of observation and
experiment. But as significant as the manner by which we got here is
that we have gotten this far.
At this point in the story, what can we conclude about why we are
here? The answer seems all the more remarkable because it reveals
explicitly just how deeply the universe of our experience is a shadow
of reality.
I also began this book with a quote from the naturalist J. A. Baker,
from The Peregrine: “The hardest thing of all to see is what is really
there.” I did so because the story I have told is the most profound
exam
ple of this wise observation that I know of.
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I next described Plato’s Allegory of the Cave because I know of no
better or more lyrical representation of the actual history of science.
The triumph of human existence has been to escape the chains that
our limited senses have imposed upon us. To intuit that beneath the
world of our experience lies a reality that is often far stranger. It is a
reality whose mathematical beauty may be unimpeachable, but a
reality in which our existence becomes—more than we might ever
have imagined in advance—a mere afterthought.
If we now ask why things are the way they are, the best answer we
can suggest is that it is the result of an accident in the history of the
universe in which a field froze in empty space in a certain way.
When we ponder what significance that might have, we might
equally ponder what is the significance of that specific ice crystal
seen in the early-morning frost on a windowpane. The rules that
allowed us to come into being seem no more worth fighting and
dying for than it would seem to be to fight and die to resolve
whether “up” in the ice-crystal universe is better than “down,” or
whether it is better to crack an egg from the top or the bottom.
Our primitive ancestors survived in large part because they
recognized that nature could be hostile and violent, even as it was
remarkable. The progress of science has made it clear just how
violent and hostile the universe can be for life. But recognizing this
does not make the universe less amazing. Such a universe has ample
room for awe, wonder, and excitement. If anything, recognition of
these facts gives us greater reason to celebrate our origins, and our
survival.
To argue that, in a universe in which there seems to be no
purpose, our existence is itself without meaning or value is
unparalleled solipsism, as it suggests that without us the universe is
worthless. The greatest gift that science can give us is to allow us to
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overcome our need to be the center of existence even as we learn to
appreciate the wonder of the accident we are privileged to witness.
Light played a major role in our story, as it did in Plato’s allegory.
Our changing perception of light led us to a changing understanding
of the essence of space and time. Ultimately that changing
perception made it clear that even this messenger of reality that is so
essential to us and our existence is itself merely a fortunate
consequence of a cosmic accident. An accident that may someday be
rectified.
It is appropriate here to recognize that the line in the Aeneid that
follows the epigraph with which this book began was the hopeful cry
“Release your fear.” A future that might bring about our end does not
negate the majesty of the journey we are still taking.
The story I have told is not the whole story. There is likely to be
far more that we don’t understand than what we now do. In the
search for meaning, our understanding of reality will surely change
as the story continues to unfold. I am often told that science can
never do some things. Well, how do we know until we try?
As fate would have it, I am writing these final words while sitting
at the desk at which my late friend and coconspirator in the battle
against myth and superstition Christopher Hitchens wrote his
masterpiece, God Is Not Great. It is hard not to feel his presence
channeling these words, even as I know he would be the first to
remind me that such feelings arise from inside my head, and not
from anything more cosmically significant. Yet the title of his book
emphasizes that human stories, which he loved so dearly and
described so brilliantly, pale in comparison to the story that nature
has driven us to discover. And so the human stories about God also
pale in comparison to the real “greatest story ever told.”
This story ultimately does not give the past special significance.
We can reflect upon and even celebrate the road we have taken, but
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the greatest liberation, and the greatest solace that science provides,
come from perhaps its greatest lesson: that the best parts of the story
can yet be written.
Surely this possibility makes the cosmic drama of our existence
worthwhile.
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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
This book is written in part as a tribute to all of those who
have helped bring our understanding of the universe to the place it is
today. Because I wanted to properly and appropriately represent the
science, and the history, to help me check both I turned to a number
of my colleagues after I finished the first version of this book. I
received comments and useful suggestions and corrections in
response, and I want to thank both Sheldon Glashow and Wally
Gilbert for their suggestions, as well as Richard Dawkins, and I am
particularly indebted to one of the colleagues I admire most for his
contributions as a scientist and his scientific integrity, who would
rather remain anonymous, for his careful reading of the manuscript,
and the numerous corrections he proposed. Beyond the science, I
turned to a friend and one of the writers I admire most, who is also a
wonderful student of science, for his thoughts on the manuscript.
Cormac McCarthy, who amazingly volunteered to copyedit the
paperback version of my earlier book Quantum Man, again went
through every single page of the manuscript he received, with
comments and suggestions to, in his words, “make the book perfect.”
I cannot presume that it now is, but I can say that it is much better
thanks to his kindness, wisdom, and talent.
This book would never have been written if determining a
publisher hadn’t been skillfully managed by my new agent and old
friend John Brockman and his staff, and happily it worked out that
my editor for this book was my editor for A Universe from Nothing,
Leslie Meredith at Atria Books. Leslie is not only a kindred spirit, but
was a wonderful foil off of which to bounce the ideas in this book.
She helped force me to make various discussions of the science
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clearer, even when I thought they were already clear, and she
encouraged me not to back off from my strong views on the need for
scientists to speak out about scientific nonsense.
When I faced the arduous task of exploring a variety of significant
revisions in the final draft, I knew that I could seek safety, support,
and solitude in the home that my wonderful wife, Nancy, who has
saved me and inspired me more times than I can count, has made for
us, and that my stepdaughter, Santal, would quietly tolerate the
sound of my typing in my study, right above her bedroom, late at
night. My staff at the Origins Project, in particular my executive
director and right-hand woman, Amelia Huggins, and my longtime
executive assistant at Arizona State University, Jessica Strycker,
pitched in to provide me the support and time I needed when I
had
to take time out from my day job to work on this book. And my
Phoenix friends Thomas Houlon and Patty Barnes, who encouraged
me on this book and others, have, over many breakfasts, given their
feedback on a number of the presentations I developed as I was
writing the book.
Finally, as I was approaching the last push, my friend Carol Blue,
Christopher Hitchens’s widow, and her father, Edwin Blue, offered
me use of a guesthouse where Christopher had written many essays
and books, including his wonderful book God Is Not Great. I cannot
think of a more inspiring place to have finished, and I can only hope
the final version carries with it even a small fraction of the eloquence
that so characterized Christopher’s writing.
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A B O U T T H E AU T H O R
Lawrence M. Krauss is director of the Origins Project at Arizona
State University and Foundation Professor in the School of Earth
and Space Exploration and the Physics Department there. Krauss is
an internationally known theoretical physicist with wide research
interests, including the interface between elementary-particle
physics and cosmology, where his studies include the early universe,
the nature of dark matter, general relativity, and neutrino
astrophysics. He has investigated questions ranging from the nature
of exploding stars to issues of the origin of all mass in the universe.
He has won numerous international awards for both his research
and his efforts to improve the public understanding of science.
Krauss is the only physicist to have received the top awards from all
three US physics societies: the American Physical Society, the
American Institute of Physics, and the American Association of
Physics Teachers, and in 2012 he was awarded the National Science
Board’s prestigious Public Service Award for his many contributions
to public education and the understanding of science around the
world. Among his other honors are the 2013 Roma Award, from the
city of Rome, and the 2015 Humanist of the Year Award from the
American Humanist Association.
Krauss is the author of more than three hundred scientific
publications, as well as numerous popular articles on science and
ͥ͟͞
current affairs. He is a commentator and essayist for periodicals such
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