Review: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

Back in 2003, it was cool to rag on theists. You see, back then people were literally talking about a giant religious war between Christians and Muslims. People were talking about civilization-scale warfare. Any thinking person was like, "I think I remember a John Lennon song about that?" That's when Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennet wrote their classical New Atheism books. At the time they were necessary! The Bible Belt was screaming about religious terror, forgetting that they were still instigating terror at home.

"Oh, you want to destroy our buildings, rewrite our history, live off planet-poisoning oil and create a country based on the religious law from a time when everybody on the planet wore sandals? Well, we do everything better and bigger over here in Texas."

Again, in 2003 it was probably a necessary reminder "HEY GOD ISN'T REAL GUYS".

But by 2012 nobody was super concerned about that shit. We were concerned about whether or not healthcare was a right (it is) and if the government should force you to buy healthcare (it does).

So why the fuck did Krauss spend 1/5th of his book ragging on theologians, philosophers and religious folk? I came to read about the "Origin of the Universe" as part of my "read a bunch of history books from Big Bang to Twitter" project, and instead I got a bunch of poorly executed anti-religious dunking.

The scientific content of the book, when it is there, is pretty good: We discovered the universe was expanding, and then we discovered the Cosmic Background Radiation. We probed that and then found the Universe is as close to "flat" as it possibly can be (Pythagorean's Theorem works!) This is pretty special because it means the Universe won't collapse into itself, and when you pair it with quantum gravity you have a nice hypothesis for *why* it is flat: rapid inflation in space-time made what would otherwise be a curve into a flat line. Great theory!

The book, however, doesn't answer its subtitle "Why there is Something Rather Than Nothing" and another 1/5 of the book is spent railing about how people keep changing the definition of "Nothing".

They don't. Krauss is/was just drumming up controversy for this(/his next) book.

1/5 Anti-Theologizing.
1/5 Anti-Philosophizing.
3/5s Science.

3/5 Stars.