On a recent 21 day river trip, the Colorado carving down into 1.8 billion year old rock and the stars of the 14.2 billion year old universe shining brightly at night, I was surprised how little the question, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” intrigued my companions.  Or, as Jim Holt puts it in the title to his latest book, Why Does the World Exist?  One boater I proposed the question to said with a shrug ‘I don’t know.  I haven’t thought about that since I was eleven years old.’  More pertinent were the questions of how to repair a slow leak in the pressure relief valve of a raft, and who was cooking dinner that night.

Fair enough.  I too remember looking up at the stars when I was about that age and trying to get a grip on ‘infinity,” and ‘eternity.’  Though the Why question, which hasn’t stayed at the top of my heap of unanswered questions since, certainly returns from time to time. Holt’s book took me on a wider and deeper expedition in search of an answer than I had imagined possible.

For example, might the universe have been caused by a hacker in another universe?  This came not from a 17 year old gamer far gone on speculation but from one of the pre-eminent physicists of the day.  Or, how about the possibility that some distant ancestors travel back through time to cause the Big Bang?

The question of ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ in Leibniz’s pithy phrasing (in German of course) intrigued writer Jim Holt enough that he spent several years in conversation and e-mail correspondence with some of the brightest cosmologists, physicists, philosophers and theologians of our day, all of whom had spent considerable time grappling with the question.  Spoiler: His book doesn’t answer the question.  The rewards of reading it are plenty, however.  Intriguing idea and issues, from 0 splitting to become +1 and -1 (something coming from nothing) to Plato’s notion of The Good as the cause of existence, are rolled out to savor.  If they were all tobacco it would be an excellent smoke.

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My way of trying to understand the varieties of cosmological inquiry was to make a decision tree.  Descending from the question itself there are three branches: on the right are those who don’t care, are not curious; in the middle are those who say the answer is God; on the left are those who say God aside (probably not one,) physical laws may point to an answer, or not–no answer about the outside of a system can be answered from inside.

Curiously, the question of the beginnings of the universe had not been of scientific interest until the recent convergence of agreement that in fact our universe began with the Big Bang.  Although religious thinkers had long settled on the original cause of the Universe being God, who was either eternal, or had ’caused himself,’ (the famous causa sui formulation), physicists as deep as Einstein had let the question go by, asserting that the Universe was eternal.  In fact, when the famous theory of relativity predicted an expanding universe, implying a beginning and an end, Einstein threw in a fudge factor to make it steady-state, and so, eternal.

Now that the Big Bang as blown a hole in eternity — at least the eternity of this universe– the question of first cause again becomes intriguing.

Back to God.  From the God Did It branch are two sub branches: 1) the traditionalists, who say just God,  eternal or causa sui and the other 2) an intriguing fellow who says God ‘because that is the simplest answer,’ satisfying the (modern) requirement in math and physics that the simplest, most elegant, answer is likely the right one.

The leftmost branch is thick and winding, though the first node through which all must pass is ‘what is nothing?’  Is nothing possible?  Holt leads us through biographies and thought experiments that refute nothingness through 1) the observer argument– to even imagine nothingness there must be an imaginer, or 2) through the container argument which itself has two children: 1) the substantival view, favored by Newton, that space, even if completely empty, is still a space — an empty cupboard, and 2) the relational view, which Liebniz (Newton’s great rival and simultaneous creator of the calculus) held — that space is merely the relationship between objects; ergo, no things, no space.

The question of the existence of nothingness (a logical contradiction) has puzzled many, from Paramenides to John Updike to philosophy students of today.  Martin Heidegger, the (in)famous German philosopher tried to escape the problem of the ‘existence’ of nothing by suggesting that since nothingness can not be, it noths, [that being a translation of what he actually said: Das Nichts nichtet.]

The importance of all this is that if nothingness can’t exist, then the question of ‘why something rather than nothing’ becomes nonsensical.  Whew! ‘Off then,’ as Adolf Grunbaum would say, ‘to have a beer!’  Holt characterizes Grunbaum as ‘the great rejectionist,’ for thinking the question inane.  Why shouldn’t there be something?  Why should a Null World be the natural state of affairs?  This leads to an extended discussion of the ‘beauty of simplicity’ and the trump card of Occam’s razor. Holt is not fully convinced by Grunbaum that he is off on a shaggy-dog search (though almost) and proceeds to interview, question, summarize and dispute with, Pythagoras, St Anslem, Jean Paul Sartre, Kurt Godel, Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg, Stephan Hawking, Roger Penrose and a constellation of others, many of whom have written if not books, long epistles about the matter.

[Oh, and by the way, it turns out that the nothingness of quantum physics is not the nothingness of a thought experiment. Empty space, if not full of ‘stuff’  is at least rich in structures.  “A quantum vacuum is much more than an empty bank account’ says David Deutch, ‘because it’s got structure.”  Particles and their anti-particles are known to spontaneously pop up in a vacuum. A vacuum fluctuation, like a champagne bubble with no champagne, might have set the whole present universe in motion.]

And anyway, for the writer, nothingness or not, the question remains: why does the world exist?

Once nothingness is disposed of, the many branching tree of thought becomes almost a thicket, hard to even hack your way through. Branch after branch, from quantum tunneling to string theory, from whether the laws of physics exist outside of time or only in this universe, from what might be on the other side of a boundary condition to discussions of the conceptual canyon between consciousness and matter twist and twine through space and around each other.  Stephen Hawking wants a quantum theory of gravity to even make possible an answer to the question ‘does time have a beginning?’ Derek Parfit looks for a ‘selector’ feature which in the possibility of All Possible Worlds, selects the cosmic reality of which we are a part.  Others speak about a landscape of possible worlds, which at last count is 10 to the 500th power.

For some readers this will be heady stuff.  Informed speculation, about multi-verses, parallel universes, what might have been before time, the possibility of consciousness in every thing (panpsychism meets Spinoza) and yes, hackers creating universes and the idea of Big Bang retrocausation will be endlessly interesting — even when everyone, finally, has to stand on ‘brute fact,’ the famous mommy answer, ‘just because.’  For others, I imagine, it would be quite soporific. I mean, really, to hear that some famous man has opined that anything that is ‘possible’ is therefore ‘real,’ — why go on? Or that another famous thinker thinks that goodness requires the existence of the universe — um, OK.  Let’s turn the dial.

Along the way there are bracing opinions about God (or Not God.)  A surprising number of high theoreticians seem to have room for such a Concept.  Even more surprising (to me) is that He is for some that anthropomorphic fellow who guides our daily lives, from copulation to cooking, from tornadoes to terror attacks, and is not a more ‘essentialist’ being which pervades all. Richard Dawkins and Adolf Grunbaum make the case for the Not Godders — both with ungodly glee. [See some Dawkins, here.]

For those interested in such questions and the sometimes difficult concepts and arguments, Holt’s mix of knowledgeable and detailed exposition with a breezy, personal style might not suit all. For example when he describes Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winning physicist, as making “an excellent Oberon, king of the fairies in a Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and goes on with ‘So feeling rather like Nick Bottom myself,’ or when setting out Hegel’s notion of Pure Being, which is negation, he asks,  ‘Did I hear a rim shot?’ Others will find him an excellent guide, self confident and relaxed, knowing his way around, and letting you, the reader, in on the inside stuff.

I am one who needs to, and does, read such ideas as in a slow drip:  not too much at once, but enough so that the pathway doesn’t dry out between hits.  I’m familiar with most of the names in the book though usually unaccompanied by many of the details of their work or thought.  So to get Feynman (whose lectures I’ve listened to) connected to David Deutsch (whose name I knew not) and he to Alan Turing and them  to the idea of a universal quantum computer adds a few more struts to a slow growing scaffolding in my own unquiet mind.  Even if, in the end, the promising new building remains unbuilt, it seems more interesting to me to labor at the construction than to do crossword puzzles.

It did tickle me to find in Holt’s epilogue, a Buddhist monk who reverses the early contention over nothingness, in which the question of “Why is there Something instead of Nothing?”, seemed ill formed because Nothingness could not exist.  For the Buddhist, the something of the world was simply an illusion, so for him too, the question had no meaning!

Not knowing much, and learning a bit more, I was surprised that Holt did not include Lee Smolin among those he interviewed.  He certainly knows him, having reviewed his book  “The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next” for the New Yorker in October, 2006, 6 years before Why Does the World Exist, was published. In a recent conversation on “The Edge,” Smolin dives right into the middle of Holt’s (and our) question: “The main question I’m asking myself, the question that puts everything together, is how to do cosmology; how to make a theory of the universe as a whole system.”

Traveling slowly down the Colorado with more quiet time than usual, where remnants of the young million year old lava dikes reinforce how long ago 300 million years is — no mastodons, no dinosaurs, no birds, no mammals, reptiles just beginning– put me in a temper to think about such things. Before the 1.8 billion year old Vishnu schist came the 3 billion year old sediment that then got cooked and became the schist.  Before the sediment was the molten earth, before the earth the swirling elements, before the elements the inflating universe, before that the bang, before that may have been no beforeness, time creating itself causa sui.… oh I don’t know.  But the stars at night from the canyon floor do their slow rotation dusk to dawn, constellations seem to rise and fall.  How can I not wonder about it all?