Do We Live in a Purposeless Universe?
What’s the Latest Development?
The last century of space exploration has changed our understanding of the Universe—and ourselves—more than all previous history. Most recently, the Large Hadron Collider has revealed the ‘Higgs field’, which apparently just happened to form throughout the space in our Universe. “It is only because all elementary particles interact with this field that they have the mass we observe today,” says cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. And thanks to quantum mechanics, says Krauss, we can understand how our entire Universe was created from nothing.
What’s the Big Idea?
If gravity is also governed by quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle implies that entire Universes might appear and disappear in what is otherwise entirely empty space. In other words, we may need to reevaluate what we understand to be ‘something’ and ‘nothing’. And so the famous question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is revolutionized. “Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue,” says Krauss, who prefers an impossibly complex universe to hiding behind fairy tales that justify our existence.
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