A Universe From Nothing

A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, by Lawrence M. Krauss.

Financial Times, 10-11 March 2012

Why is there something rather than nothing? “While this is usually framed as a philosophical or religious question,” writes Lawrence Krauss in A Universe from Nothing, “it is first and foremost a question about the natural world, and so the appropriate place to try and resolve it, first and foremost, is with science.”

A leading physicist at Arizona State University, Krauss begins his entertaining and engaging introduction to cosmology by pointing out that when scientists ask “why?” they usually mean “how?” So for “Why is the Earth 93m miles from the Sun?” read “How is the Earth 93m miles from the Sun?” What we need to understand are the physical processes that led to the Earth ending up in its present position.

“Nothing expands the mind like the expanding universe,” says Richard Dawkins in an afterword to this book. It was the American astronomer Edwin Hubble who, in the 1920s, discovered the first evidence that we lived in an expanding universe. As Krauss makes clear, the weight of the accumulated observational data since points to a Big Bang some 13.75bn years ago.

There have been a number of fine cosmology books published recently, but few have gone so far, and none so eloquently, in exploring why it is unnecessary to invoke God to light the blue touchpaper and set the universe in motion.

An instant after the Big Bang, the cosmos was smaller than an atom. It is here that the best theory physicists have for understanding the science at this atomic level comes into play: quantum mechanics. Often counter-intuitively, this describes an atomic reality where “virtual” particles can pop in and out of existence in a time so short they cannot be seen but only inferred from circumstantial evidence.

Lawrence Krauss

“At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs – as long as no one is watching, anything goes,” explains Krauss. Given the size of the baby universe after the Big Bang, quantum mechanics suggests it is possible that space and time, like virtual particles, just pop out of nothing because “nothing” is an unstable state. This is a concept of “nothing” far removed from the ordinary usage of the word: in quantum physics it is full of potential and possibilities, always poised on the verge of something.

So why does the universe exist? “Ultimately,” Krauss admits, “this question may be no more significant or profound than asking why some flowers are red and some are blue.” Nevertheless, I am glad that there are scientists like him who will tackle it all the same. 

How the Hippies Saved Physics

How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser 


Financial Times, 14-15 January 2012


Quantum teleportation may sound like science fiction, but in 1997 a team led by Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger turned it into a scientific fact. A single particle was transported, not physically but through transferring its quantum properties to a second particle, thereby effectively teleporting it from one place to another. Although not as dramatic as Captain Kirk being “beamed up”, it was nonetheless a stunning demonstration of a process deemed impossible just a decade earlier.


Even more remarkable is the fact that quantum teleportation and – for example – the ideas that underpin quantum-encrypted bank transfers have their origins in the hazy, drug-fuelled excesses of the 1970s New Age movement. As David Kaiser, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains in How the Hippies Saved Physics, many of the concepts at the heart of today’s science of quantum information can be traced back to a freewheeling circle of young physicists involved in an informal discussion group founded in May 1975 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.


Calling themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group” (FFG), they met weekly for nearly four years as they sought to recapture the excitement and mystery that had attracted them to physics in the first place. Members came and went as the group organised workshops and conferences on everythingfrom LSD to extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, psychokinesis and eastern mysticism with a heavy dose of quantum physics – the science of the atomic and sub-atomic levels of reality where mind-bending, counterintuitive ideas are the norm. This heady cocktail was already being sipped in the very first meeting, as Fritjof Capra spoke about his then new book The Tao of Physics, in which he argued that parallels existed between quantum theory and eastern mysticism.

Kaiser, too, sees an interconnection between the FFG, quantum pioneers such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and the debate over what quantum physics reveals about the nature of reality. Einstein admitted to having spent a hundred times longer thinking about quantum physics than his theory of relativity and believed there was “a real world existing independently of perception”. Bohr, meanwhile, maintained that there was no objective reality but only an “abstract quantum description”.


By the time Capra and FFG members began studying physics in the 1960s and 1970s, the cold war imperative to find practical applications meant that such philosophical engagement had fallen out of fashion in favour of a “shut up and calculate” approach.

John Bell

What fascinates Kaiser is the mismatch between the FFG scientists’ “soaring intellectual aspirations and their modest professional platform” as they rescued Bell’s theorem – one of the great achievements of 20th-century physics – from a decade of obscurity. In 1964 John Bell managed to discover what had eluded both Einstein and Bohr: a mathematical theorem that offered a way of deciding between their opposing world views. Bell’s theorem stipulated that quantum objects that had once interacted with each other would retain a strange connection. Nudge a particle here and its partner would instantaneously dance over there – they remained “entangled” regardless of whether they were nanometres or light years apart.

Entanglement, for the likes of Capra, was akin to the eastern mystics’ emphasis on holism. Not everyone may have followed him there, but as the FFG grappled with Bell’s theorem it forced more conventionally minded physicists to pay attention. Today only the provenance of its successes would raise an eyebrow. Like so many of their peers, the hippies who “saved” physics have been absorbed by the mainstream. 

Geek Nation

Geek Nation: How Indian science is taking over the world by Angela Saini

Financial Times, 19-20 March 2011

‘It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.’ The inclusion of this statement in the Indian constitution, which came into effect on January 26 1950, was insisted upon byJawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.

Nehru’s ‘scientific temper’ is a wonderfully concise phrase, which describes his vision of a nation in which people could think independently, employ logic and understand the scientific method. In a land of religion, Nehru put his faith in science and technology. He believed that it was ‘science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition’ and that the ‘future belongs to science and to those who make friends with science’. Nehru wanted a nation of geeks.

‘Wherever in the world we live, Indians and people of Indian origin are famous for being swots, nerds, dweebs, boffins, and dorks,’ writes Angela Saini in Geek Nation. A British science journalist of Indian parentage, Saini spent six months in India exploring Nehru’s geek nation almost 50 years after his death.

With a population approaching 1.2 billion, India has the largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world. While the literacy rate hovers around a dismal 60 per cent, some 400 universities produce two million graduates every year, including a staggering 600,000 engineers, the most sought after of which are from the 16 Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT’s). Yet, instead of discovering hothouses of intellectual curiosity and innovation, Saini found drones, not geeks. The relentless pressure on India’s students is ‘disabling imaginations’ and driving hundreds to suicide.

From the vast Soviet-style Bhabha Atomic Research Centre to the Academy of Sanskrit Research, ‘the geeky and the bizarre’ sit side-by-side; wacky ideas are more easily tolerated than in the west. Indians, Saini observes, have ‘a unique freedom to explore the edges of what’s believed to be possible’.

Indian science is far from taking over the world: it currently contributes less than 3 per cent of global research output, lagging far behind the US and UK. Yet an increasing number of Indian researchers, having established reputations aboard, are returning home to lead a younger generation.

Saini’s vivid portrait of hi-tech India reveals a country in a hurry. No one knows how long it will take, but India’s present economic expansion is a reminder that more than 1,000 years ago it had a scientific culture as advanced as any in the world. ‘The Empires of the future,’ Winston Churchill once said, ‘are going to be the empires of the mind.’

Species Seekers

A Breed of their own

The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth by Richard Conniff

Financial Times, 20-21 November 2010

‘Our perfect naturalist,’ wrote the English clergyman, naturalist and novelist Charles Kingsley in 1855, “should be strong in body; able to haul a dredge, climb a rock, turn a boulder, walk all day … he should know how to swim for his life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and ride the first horse which comes to hand; and, finally, he should be a thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman; and, if he go far abroad, be able on occasion to fight for his life.’

Amid the tales of adventure and hardship vividly told by the American science writer Richard Conniff in this marvelous book, most of those naturalists who made it their mission to travel the globe in of search glory and new species were far from perfect. But as he captures the mania for collecting and cataloguing the natural world in the 18th and 19th centuries, Conniff shows that these daredevil amateurs played an invaluable ‘part in building a great and permanent body of knowledge’.

What does it mean to discover a species? Surely local people had known most of these species for many years before they were ‘discovered’. Discovery, explains Conniff, isn’t just a matter of being the first person to lay eyes on an animal, plant or insect. You must recognize that there’s something different about it and explain in print just how and why it’s different. That requires some scheme of classification.

At the beginning of the 18th century, naturalists knew only a few thousand species, and sometimes could not even distinguish plants from animals. That changed in 1735 when the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus published his system for identifying and classifying species.

Armed with the Linnaean system, guns, nets, collecting boxes and an almost missionary sense of purpose, species seekers went everywhere, from the Namib Desert to the Great Barrier Reef, and brought back creatures that even the authors of medieval bestiaries could hardly have imagined.

Naturalists were often caught up in the business of conquest and colonization, using natural history to advance their own careers and to remake the world on European lines. Yet many of us are alive today, for instance, because naturalists identified obscure species that later turned out to cause malaria, yellow fever, typhus and other epidemic diseases.

Modern species seekers still aim to catalogue every species on Earth, even though the tally is nearing 2m, and new ones are found daily. In 2003, the eminent American zoologist E. O. Wilson proposed the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based project with a page for every species within 25 years. But as Wilson acknowledged at the time, ‘the truth is that we do not know how many species of organisms exist on Earth even to the nearest order of magnitude.’ He thought the final count would be about 10m. Others believe it could be 50m or even 100m - numbers that Conniff’s heroes and fools could not have imagined. We still live in the great age of discovery and this is the story of how it began.