Lawrence Krauss - The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far Read online

  Praise for The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far

  “In every debate I’ve done with theologians and religious believers,

  their knock-out final argument always comes in the form of two

  questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? and Why are

  we here? The presumption is that if science provides no answers then

  there must be a God. But God or no, we still want answers. In A

  Universe from Nothing Lawrence Krauss, one of the biggest thinkers

  of our time, addressed the first question with verve, and in The

  Greatest Story Ever Told he tackles the second with elegance. Both

  volumes should be placed in hotel rooms across America, in the

  drawer next to the Gideon Bible.”

  —Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, columnist for

  Scientific American, and author of The Moral Arc

  “A Homeric tale of science, history, and philosophy revealing how

  we learned so much about the universe and its tiniest parts.”

  —Sheldon Glashow, Nobel laureate in physics

  “Discovering the bedrock nature of physical reality ranks as one of

  humanity’s greatest collective achievements. This book gives a fine

  account of the main ideas and how they emerged. Krauss is himself

  close to the field and can offer insights into the personalities who

  have led the key advances. A practiced and skilled writer, he

  succeeds in making the physics ‘as simple as possible but no simpler.’

  I don’t know a better book on this subject.”

  —Martin Rees, author of Just Six Numbers

  “It is an exhilarating experience to be led through this fascinating

  story, from Galileo to the Standard Model and the Higgs boson and

  beyond, with lucid detail and insight, illuminating vividly not only

  the achievements themselves but also the joy of creative thought and

  discovery, enriched with vignettes of the remarkable individuals who

  paved the way. It amply demonstrates that the discovery that ‘nature

  really follows the simple and elegant rules intuited by the twentieth-

  and twenty-first-century versions of Plato’s philosophers’ is one of

  the most astonishing achievements of the human intellect.”

  —Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics

  (emeritus), MIT

  “Charming . . . Krauss has written an account with sweep and verve

  that shows the full development of our ideas about the makeup of

  the world around us. . . . A great romp.”

  —Walter Gilbert, Nobel laureate in chemistry

  “I loved the fight scenes and the sex scenes were excellent.”

  —Eric Idle

  ͡

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part One: Genesis

  Chapter 1: From the Armoire to the Cave

  Chapter 2: Seeing in the Dark

  Chapter 3: Through a Glass, Lightly

  Chapter 4: There, and Back Again

  Chapter 5: A Stitch in Time

  Chapter 6: The Shadows of Reality

  Chapter 7: A Universe Stranger than Fiction

  Chapter 8: A Wrinkle in Time

  Chapter 9: Decay and Rubble

  Chapter 10: From Here to Infinity: Shedding Light on the Sun

  Part Two: Exodus

  Chapter 11: Desperate Times and Desperate Measures

  Chapter 12: March of the Titans

  Chapter 13: Endless Forms Most Beautiful: Symmetry Strikes Back

  Chapter 14: Cold, Stark Reality: Breaking Bad or Beautiful?

  Chapter 15: Living inside a Superconductor

  Chapter 16: The Bearable Heaviness of Being: Symmetry Broken,

  Physics Fixed

  ͢

  Part Three: Revelation

  Chapter 17: The Wrong Place at the Right Time

  Chapter 18: The Fog Lifts

  Chapter 19: Free at Last

  Chapter 20: Spanking the Vacuum

  Chapter 21: Gothic Cathedrals of the Twenty-First Century

  Chapter 22: More Questions than Answers

  Chapter 23: From a Beer Party to the End of Time

  Epilogue: Cosmic Humility

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  ͣ

  For Nancy

  ͤ

  These are the tears of things,

  and the stuff of our mortality

  cuts us to the heart.

  —VIRGIL

  ͥ

  P R O L O G U E

  The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.

  —J. A. BAKER, THE PEREGRINE

  In the beginning there was light.

  But more than this, there was gravity.

  After that, all hell broke loose. . . .

  This is how the story of the greatest intellectual adventure in

  history might properly be introduced. It is a story of science’s quest

  to uncover the hidden realities underlying the world of our

  experience, which required marshaling the very pinnacle of human

  creativity and intellectual bravery on an unparalleled global scale.

  This process would not have been possible without a willingness to

  dispense with all kinds of beliefs and preconceptions and dogma,

  scientific and otherwise. The story is filled with drama and surprise.

  It spans the full arc of human history, and most remarkably, the

  current version isn’t even the final one—just another working draft.

  It’s a story that deserves to be shared far more broadly. Already in

  the first world, parts of this story are helping to slowly replace the

  myths and superstitions that more ignorant societies found solace in

  centuries or millennia ago. Nevertheless, thanks to the directors

  George Stevens and David Lean, the Judeo-Christian Bible is still

  sometimes referred to as “the greatest story ever told.” This

  characterization is astounding because, even allowing for the

  frequent sex and violence, and a bit of poetry in the Psalms, the Bible

  as a piece of literature arguably does not compare well to the equally

  racy but less violent Greek and Roman epics such as the Aeneid or

  the Odyssey—even if the English translation of the Bible has served

  as a model for many subsequent books. Either way, as a guide for

  ͜͝

  understanding the world, the Bible is pathetically inconsistent and

  outdated. And one might legitimately argue that as a guide for

  human behavior large swaths of it border on the obscene.

  In science, the very word sacred is profane. No ideas, religious or

  otherwise, get a free pass. For this reason the pinnacle of the human

  story did not conclude with a prophet’s sacrifice two thousand years

  ago, any more than it did with the death of another prophet six

  hundred years later. The story of our origins and our future is a tale

  that keeps on telling. And the story is getting more interesting all the

  time, not due to revelation, but due to the steady march of scientific

  discovery.

  Contrary to many popular perceptions, this scientific story also

  encompa
sses both poetry and a deep spirituality. But this spirituality

  has the additional virtue of being tied to the real world—and not

  created in large part to appease our hopes and dreams.

  The lessons of our exploration into the unknown, led not by our

  desires, but by the force of experiment, are humbling. Five hundred

  years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of

  enforced ignorance. By this standard, what cosmic arrogance lies at

  the heart of the assertion that the universe was created so that we

  could exist? What myopia lies at the heart of the assumption that the

  universe of our experience is characteristic of the universe

  throughout all of time and space?

  This anthropocentrism has fallen by the wayside as a result of the

  story of science. What replaces it? Have we lost something in the

  process, or as I shall argue, have we gained something even greater?

  I once said at a public event that the business of science is to

  make people uncomfortable. I briefly regretted the remark because I

  worried that it would scare people away. But being uncomfortable is

  a virtue, not a hindrance. Everything about our evolutionary history

  has primed our minds to be comfortable with concepts that helped

  ͝͝

  us survive, such as the natural teleological tendency children have to

  assume objects exist to serve a goal, and the broader tendency to

  anthropomorphize, to assign agency to lifeless objects, because

  clearly it is better to mistake an inert object for a threat than a threat

  for an inert object.

  Evolution didn’t prepare our minds to appreciate long or short

  timescales or short or huge distances that we cannot experience

  directly. So it is no wonder that some of the remarkable discoveries

  of the scientific method, such as evolution and quantum mechanics,

  are nonintuitive at best, and can draw most of us well outside our

  myopic comfort zone.

  This is also what makes the greatest story ever told so worth

  telling. The best stories challenge us. They cause us to see ourselves

  differently, to realign our picture of ourselves and our place in the

  cosmos. This is not only true for the greatest literature, music, and

  art. It is true of science as well.

  In this sense it is unfortunate that replacing ancient beliefs with

  modern scientific enlightenment is often described as a “loss of

  faith.” How much greater is the story our children will be able to tell

  than the story we have told? Surely that is the greatest contribution

  of science to civilization: to ensure that the greatest books are not

  those of the past, but of the future.

  Every epic story has a moral. In ours, we find that letting the

  cosmos guide our minds through empirical discovery can produce a

  great richness of spirit that harnesses the best of what humanity has

  to offer. It can give us hope for the future by allowing us to enter it

  with our eyes open and with the necessary tools to actively

  participate in it.

  • • •

  ͝͞

  My previous book, A Universe from Nothing, described how the

  revolutionary discoveries over the past hundred years have changed

  the way we understand our evolving universe on its largest scales.

  This change has led science to begin to directly address the question

  “Why is there something rather than nothing?”—which was formerly

  religious territory—and rework it into something less solipsistic and

  operationally more useful.

  Like A Universe from Nothing, this story also originated in a

  lecture I presented, in this case at the Smithsonian Institution in

  Washington, DC, which generated some excitement at the time, and

  as a result I was once again driven to elaborate upon the ideas I

  started to develop there. In contrast to A Universe from Nothing, in

  this book I explore the other end of the spectrum of our knowledge

  and its equally powerful implications for understanding age-old

  questions. The profound changes over the past hundred years in the

  way we understand nature at its smallest scales are allowing us to

  similarly co-opt the equally fundamental question “Why are we

  here?”

  We will find that reality is not what we think it is. Under the

  surface are “weird,” counterintuitive, invisible inner workings that

  can challenge our preconceptions of what makes sense as much as a

  universe arising from nothing might.

  And like the conclusion I drew in my last book, the ultimate

  lesson from the story I will tell here is that there is no obvious plan

  or purpose to the world we find ourselves living in. Our existence

  was not preordained, but appears to be a curious accident. We teeter

  on a precarious ledge with the ultimate balance determined by

  phenomena that lie well beneath the surface of our experience—

  phenomena that don’t rely in any way upon our existence. In this

  sense, Einstein was wrong: “God” does appear to play dice with the

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  universe, or universes. So far we have been lucky. But like playing at

  the craps table, our luck may not last forever.

  • • •

  Humanity took a major step toward modernity when it dawned in

  our ancestors’ consciousness that there is more to the universe than

  meets the eye. This realization was probably not accidental. We

  appear to be hardwired to need a narrative that transcends and

  makes sense of our own existence, a need that was probably

  intimately related to the rise of religious belief in early human

  societies.

  By contrast, the story of the rise of modern science and its

  divergence from superstition is the tale of how the hidden realities of

  nature were uncovered by reason and experiment through a process

  in which seemingly disparate, strange, and sometimes threatening

  phenomena were ultimately understood to be connected just

  beneath the visible surface. Ultimately these connections dispelled

  the goblins and fairies that had earlier spawned among our

  ancestors.

  The discovery of connections between otherwise seemingly

  disparate phenomena is, more than any other single indicator, the

  hallmark of progress in science. The many classic examples include

  Newton’s connection of the orbit of the Moon to a falling apple;

  Galileo’s recognition that vastly different observed behaviors for

  falling objects obscure that they are actually attracted to the earth’s

  surface at the same rate; and Darwin’s epic realization that the

  diversity of life on Earth could arise from a single progenitor by the

  simple process of natural selection. None of these connections was

  all that obvious, at first. However, after the relationship comes to

  light and becomes clear, it prompts an “Aha!” experience of

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  understanding and familiarity. One feels like saying, “I should have

  thought of that!”

  Our modern picture of nature at its most fundamental scale—the

  Standard Model, as it has become called—contains an

  embarrassment of riches, connections that are far removed
from the

  realm of everyday experience. So far removed that it is impossible

  without some grounding to make the leap in one step to visualize

  them.

  Not surprisingly, such a single leap never occurred historically,

  either. A series of remarkable and unexpected and seemingly

  unrelated connections emerged to form the coherent picture we

  now have. The mathematical architecture that has resulted is so

  ornate that it almost seems arbitrary. “Aha!” is usually the furthest

  thing from the lips of the noninitiated when they hear about the

  Higgs boson or Grand Unification of the forces of nature.

  To move beyond the surface layers of reality, we need a story that

  connects the world we know with the deepest corners of the

  invisible world all around us. We cannot understand that hidden

  world with intuitions based solely on direct sensation. That is the

  story I want to tell here. I will take you on a journey to the heart of

  those mysteries that lie at the edge of our understanding of space,

  time, and the forces that operate within them. My goal is not to

  unnecessarily provoke or offend, but to prod you, just as we

  physicists ourselves have been prodded and dragged by new

  discoveries into a new reality that is at once both uncomfortable and

  uplifting.

  Our most recent discoveries about nature’s fundamental scales

  have chillingly altered our perception of the inevitability of our

  presence in the universe. They provide evidence too that the future

  will no doubt be radically different from what we might otherwise

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  have imagined, and they too further decrease our cosmic

  significance.

  We might prefer to deny this uncomfortable, inconvenient reality,

  this impersonal, apparently random universe, but if we view it in

  another context, all of this need not be depressing. A universe

  without purpose, which is the way it is as far as I can tell, is far more

  exciting than one designed just for us because it means that the

  possibilities of existence are so much more diverse and far ranging.

  How invigorating it is to find ourselves with an exotic menagerie to

  explore, with laws and phenomena that previously seemed beyond

  our wildest dreams, and to attempt to untangle the knotted

  confusion of experience and to search for some sense of order