I’ve been trying to find an in-depth review or critique of Lawrence Krauss’ “A Universe from Nothing”. It was panned by both the New York Times, and the Scientific American. Neither review went into the depth I was looking for. I did find a transcript of a debate between Krauss and William Lane Craig. Still not what I was looking for. I suppose what I was looking for was a discussion of opposing views on the topic by interlocutors who were fully competent in *both* physics and philosophy. Krauss is a physicist, Craig a philosopher. This difference was brought up in the debate.
“Now I’m also not a huge fan of philosophy,” Krauss
Some of what Krauss says in the debate brings to mind something Arthur Eddington “The Expanding Universe” said on the subject of “nothingness.” Page 56-57
“Since I cannot avoid introducing this question of a beginning, it has seemed to me that the most satisfactory theory would be one which made the beginning *not too unaesthetically abrupt*. This condition can only be satisfied by an Einstein universe with all the major forces balanced. Accordingly the primordial state of things which I picture is an even distribution of protons and electrons, extremely diffuse and filling all (spherical) space, remaining nearly balanced for an exceedingly long time until its inherent instability prevails. We shall see later that the density of this distribution can be calculated; it was about one proton and electron per litre. There is no hurry for anything to begin to happen. But at last small irregular tendencies accumulate, and evolution gets under way. […]
‘Perhaps it will be objected that, if one looks far enough back, this theory does not really dispense with an abrupt beginning; the whole universe must come into being at one instant in order that it may start in balance. I do not regard it in that way. To my mind *undifferentiated sameness* and *nothingness* cannot be distinguished philosophically. […]”
Now here’s Krauss.
“Nothing is unstable. Nothing will always produce something in quantum mechanics. And if you apply quantum mechanics to gravity, you can show that it’s possible that space and time themselves can come into existence when nothing existed before.”
What does Krauss mean by “nothing”?
“Because what we learned to understand, when it comes to nothingness is not what we think in our minds but what the world tells us. This is one kind of nothing. The nothingness in Hawking’s theory is another kind of nothing. And then nothingness in which there’s no laws of nature, they’re random, they occur with different laws everywhere and physics is an environmental accident, is another kind of nothing;”
How is Krauss’ account of the formation of the universe different from Eddington’s account from a logical point of view? What’s new logically or philosophically?
graalbones 