Why does the World Exist - Jim Holt

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.