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
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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
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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
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For Nancy
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These are the tears of things,
and the stuff of our mortality
cuts us to the heart.
—VIRGIL
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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
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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
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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.
• • •
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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