Holt, Jim, Why Does the World Exist? An existential
detective story. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012
“If the laws of physics are Something, then they cannot
explain why there is something rather than Nothing, since they are a part of
the Something to be explained” p.161.
The above and many other difficult, existential speculations
populate Holt's amazing journey into philosophical conjecturing on that age-old
conundrum: why is there something rather than nothing. You may have experienced
it in other, similar thoughts that come upon most people—apparently—at one time
or another, questions like, “What if I had never been born?” or “What if there
had never been an earth?” or “If God created the universe out of nothing, what
was God made of?”
Holt takes
us on a journey of discovery through the minds of brilliant thinkers past and
present and relates the history of the question going back as far as Aristotle
and Plato through Heisenberg, Descartes, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein and
forward as far as Stephen Hawking and Derek Parfit. (If this sounds like
name-dropping, well, it is; I am only marginally conversant with the entire
field.) Holt examines the literature of the dead philosophers and actually
interviews the living ones, and these interviews are illuminating. What has
been described by Hawking and others as “the theory of everything” is still
very much the holy grail which science seeks.
The world
we know is a material world. It's made of stuff that can be seen, smelled,
felt, tasted and/or heard. None of us can be blamed for growing up thinking
that matter is the basic building block of the universe, that when we hold a
hand, dig a ditch, eat an apple, we are connecting with fundamental materials
that are relatively immutable: flesh, earth, vegetation. In a way, we've always
known that when you burn a block of wood, it disappears and that its “material”
has been converted into light and heat energy. But what actually happens in
that transaction—and why we have never observed the reverse, i.e. light and
heat coalescing to form a block of wood—might not even have occurred to us.
Quantum
Mechanics has changed all that. The interchangeability of energy and matter has
required us to take a whole new view of the nature of the universe in which we
live. In the discovery that the entire universe as we have observed it is
expanding outward has raised its own questions, not the least of which is the
question of the nature of the point in space (whatever that is) at which the
expansion began, and what caused it to do so. The “Big Bang” theory is the
current explanation for the origin of the universe as we observe it, but that
doesn't explain what went 'bang', and more importantly, how?
Indeed, the
question “Why is there a universe as we know it?” might better be worded, “How
is there a universe as we know it?” The “Why?” question was answered for me in
my youth: God created the earth with its sun and moon as a home for people like
me, most likely because he craved communion with creatures with whom
companionship was possible. And so he made us to be like him. The only
reference to the “how?” was to assert that He spoke it into existence . . .
from nothing. The similarity to the idea that the universe expanded from a
point to what we see today can hardly be missed, even though Judeo-Christian
doctrine holds that nothing was needed as raw material for a created
universe—not even whatever it was that went BANG.
Which
brings us to Chapter 3: A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOTHING—probably the most amusing of
Holt's 15 chapters—is tailor-made for the stand-up comic. Holt includes a
paradoxic definition of nothing from an unnamed dictionary: “nothing (n):
a thing that does not exist,” (p. 41). Historically, persons who contemplated
the quality of nothingness saw it either as the most natural state to be
imagined, or as an evil state (I almost wrote “an evil something,”) that
annihilates something, as in Heidegger's Das Nichts nichtet, oddly
translated Nothing noths (p. 43). I picture it as similar to the
mathematical equation -1+1=0 or the collision of matter and antimatter in which
both are annihilated. But as has always been the case, the human mind reaches
some kind of limit when it tries to imagine a state of nothingness. When we
were kids, our Low German definition probably came as close as any in Holt's
catalogue: Eine uitjedreeda tweeback ohne chjarst. A dried-out bun
without a crust. In our English equivalent, it was a bladeless knife without
a handle.
We know a great deal about the behaviour
of matter and its relationship to energy; we know, for instance, that in
autumn—where we are now—the molecules in the air around us slow their
vibrations enough to affect the molecules in the tomatoes in the garden, such
that they turn somewhat solid and their cells cease to function. We “cover up
the tomatoes so they don't freeze.” We know also that although there is no
apparent physical connection between us and a friend, the text he types at any
given time appears “magically” and identically on our cell phone. What connects
us is real, but its definitely not binder twine!
A major
point to be made in the pursuit of an understanding of why there is
something instead of nothing is undoubtedly that discoveries in quantum
mechanics have given new life to curiosity about origins. Is it a philosophical
pursuit? a science quest? or is it, as Chapter 10 retails, a branch of mathematics?
Clearly
Holt is not a Christian, definitely not a creationist. For many, the lines of
enquiry he's pursuing here will
therefore be of little interest. For some, conjecture about the origin of the
universe and of life on earth is simply not relevant: we are, therefore what
we are and what we are becoming are the appropriate fields for
study.
But for those of us who follow the advances in
science, who are fascinated by the big questions regarding existence itself, Why
does the World Exist comes as a real find. I echo the review by Rebecca
Goldstein:
“To
this . . . most sweeping question, Jim Holt brings not only erudition and
precision but a great sense of adventure that sweeps us along with him, from
the cosmic to the comic, from the mantic to the maniac. Holt has written a
metaphysical page-turner and a triumph of intellectual liveliness.”
The
New York Times Book Review named Why Does the World Exist one of the 10
best books of 2012.