About half way into the book, it appears that Weinberg, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on electromagnetic forces and, in 1993, wrote Dreams of a Final Theory (an attempt to outline the search to unify the laws of nature), was Holt's best bet for an explanation as to why things are the way they are in the universe as we know it. But, in the end Weinberg, not surprisingly, throws his hands up in the air. "I think we're permanently doomed to that sense of mystery... It's part of the human tragedy: we're faced with a mystery we can't understand. "
Holt himself admits early on that the question 'why is there something rather than nothing?' may be too unwieldy for science to handle.
"Scientists can account for the organization of the physical universe. They can trace how the individual things and forces within it causally interact. They can shed light on how the universe as a whole has, in the course of its history, evolved from one state into another. But when it comes to the ultimate origin of reality, they have nothing to say. That is an enigma best left to metaphysics, or to theology, or to poetic wonderment, or to silence."
Which begs the question: Why pick up this book in the first place? It can be frustrating reading physicists explain how creation ex nihilo -- something created out of nothing -- is like a bubble forming in a glass of champagne, minus the champagne. Why not just drink the real champagne and dream? That is what it felt like, at the best moments, reading this book. Holt has successfully woven together many fine threads of scientific and metaphysical thought here and he does come up with a "proof" for why something exists. I think. I only absorbed a fraction of it, but all these bits of new information are, like protons and electrons buzzing about my synapses, creating an elixir of imaginative universes to contemplate.
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Topic: Why Does the World Exist? (Read 1127 times)