Handwaving from nothing

[bjorn]

Krauss does not seem overtly fond of philosophy these days. Of course it has nothing to do with any response to his book.

www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/

Though, perhaps unsurprisingly, he hasn't quite understood the response:

"Your book argues that physics has definitively demonstrated how something can come from nothing. Do you mean that physics has explained how particles can emerge from so-called empty space, or are you making a deeper claim?

Krauss: I'm making a deeper claim, but at the same time I think you're overstating what I argued. I don't think I argued that physics has definitively shown how something could come from nothing; physics has shown how plausible physical mechanisms might cause this to happen. I try to be intellectually honest in everything that I write, especially about what we know and what we don't know. If you're writing for the public, the one thing you can't do is overstate your claim, because people are going to believe you. They see I'm a physicist and so if I say that protons are little pink elephants, people might believe me. And so I try to be very careful and responsible. We don't know how something can come from nothing, but we do know some plausible ways that it might."

He is not happy with religious people either.

"The religious question "why is there something rather than nothing," has been around since people have been around, and now we're actually reaching a point where science is beginning to address that question. And so I figured I could use that question as a way to celebrate the revolutionary changes that we've achieved in refining our picture of the universe. I didn't write the book to attack religion, per se. The purpose of the book is to point out all of these amazing things that we now know about the universe. Reading some of the reactions to the book, it seems like you automatically become strident the minute you try to explain something naturally."

Looking for a natural explanation for getting from no nature to nature, doesn't quite seem ... natural.

[sandwiches]

The book was the subject of this radio programme -Beyond Belief - interesting discussion touching on the fine-tuning argument etc.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gf5w7

[Mike D]

I'm not impressed by his attitude, especially his attitude towards philosophy - but it's not that surprising, I guess, given the similar attempt to disenfranchise theology from others in the Nu Atheists. If you don't like what something is saying then claim it isn't saying anything.

In other words, his answer to the philosophical question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is to declare all philosophical answers to the question null and void, and to declare that only the quantum physics definition of nothing is meaningful.

[hawkinthesnow]

So, according to Krauss, there is the metaphysical nothing, and then there is the nothing as described by physics. Phew! Who would have thought that Nothing had so many interesting properties!

[himself]

If it was his intention to address the question "why is there something rather than nothing," then it behooved him to employ the concept of "nothing" used by the people who asked the question. Instead, he redefined "nothing" to mean "a particular kind of something" and showed how that could lead to something else. But we've always known that something leads to something else; so big yawn.