Why there is something rather than nothing? Try answering this question. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Kidding — no, I won’t. 😋
Many a wise man have tried, from the yogis of old, and the ancients of Greece, to the still-living cosmologists of our time, like Lawrence Krauss in his book pic.twitter.com/vIgkPAvWlD
“A #Universe From Nothing”. But… Unless you’re interested in a succinct retelling of what we currently know and don’t yet know in #cosmology, filled with anecdotal clichés and historical tidbits here and there,
I’d suggest skipping to the last chapter, which presents a tentative hypothesis that “nothing is unstable because… virtual particles and there’s less antimatter than there is matter, and so there is something”.
All different ways for the author to acknowledge that we still lack any solid understanding or proof of this Hard Problem (irony aside).
A short afterword by Richard Dawkins is rather congratulatory. But clueless. Academics are specialists these days, not Da Vincis.
Although, it’s fabulously stylish prose, rivaled perhaps only by Steven Pinker in the “#science for the masses” genre.
Seriously, I’d suggest instead to watch @PBSSpaceTime on YouTube for a much more thorough and visual overview of our current state of knowledge of cosmology and its big unknowns.
You’re a little island of #purpose in a vast desert of purposelessness. You’re an ontological castaway surrounded by a huge and meaningless #universe, an #entropy machine which does not care.
How big is the observable #universe? How small is the human in it? Take a look at this gorgeous animation.
neal.fun/size-of-space/
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