I would have had company. Why Does the World Exist? Meanwhile, Holt contemplates his own potential transformation to nothingness as a result of a horrible car crash.
What could be more commonplace than something that does exist, the tiny philosopher asks? Holt recognizes the wisdom of this formulation, but he will not let nothingness off the hook so quickly.
He is on the quest to define and understand it, before ruling it out as a less likely scenario than being. We sat down for our talk, the red camera light blinked, and our own faces scrutinized us from a computer monitor in front. A tall blackboard behind us cut off all possible escape routes. So I asked Holt several painstakingly written questions intended to make me sound smarter than I was.
He answered, we shook hands, and he walked out. The video recorded, but something misfired, and as far as the sound, there was nothing. I was upset enough not to appreciate the irony. During the interview, I asked Holt if he thought defining nothing was a futile task. After all, any definition would be confined by language and any name given to nothing would inevitably turn it into something.
Henri Bergson, a 20th-century French philosopher, tried to visualize nothingness. He could eliminate the people, the matter, space, and time, but he was left with himself. He could never get rid of the observer. Even if there is nothingness, there has to be an observer, so we could never get to an absolute nothingness. Other philosophers said that even when you eliminate all the contents of the universe, you still have an empty stage on which they all were. Perhaps you could never get there.
But I do think the concept of nothingness is logically consistent. Nothingness is a real threat even if we have problems imagining it. What if you die tomorrow? And about feet later — Ski the Face.
What if I die tomorrow, then what? I swept the dandelions aside, but they left grayish imprints. The prospect of nothingness, tomorrow, refused to materialize. Of that I am reasonably sure. The room had contained two selves; now it contained one. Underneath the grief, there is a need to understand, and underneath the need to understand, there is more grief.
Our relationship with death has changed over the centuries as well. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Why Does the World Exist? Why Does the World Exist? Following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt now enters this fractious debate with his lively and deeply informed narrative that traces the latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe.
The s "Why is there a world rather than nothing at all? The slyly humorous Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective, suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to Yahweh vs. Tracking down an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Physics Nobel Laureate, a French Buddhist monk who lived with the Dalai Lama, and John Updike just before he died, Holt pursues unexplored angles to this cosmic puzzle. As he pieces together a solution--one that sheds new light on the question of God and the meaning of existence--he offers brisk philosophical asides on time and eternity, consciousness, and the arithmetic of nothingness.
Holt traffics in wonder, a word whose dual meanings—the absence of answers; the experience of awe—strike me as profoundly related. His book is not utilitarian. And yet it does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem.
Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. More Details Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
To ask other readers questions about Why Does the World Exist? See all 3 questions about Why Does the World Exist? Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Why Does the World Exist? Jul 23, Manny rated it liked it Shelves: science , multiverse , linguistics-and-philosophy , life-is-proust.
Jessica Q. TTT: Jessica, great to meet and thank you for making space in your busy schedule. JR: The pleasure's all mine. TTT: Okay, now I know you have another meeting in half an hour, so let's cut to the chase. What's up with Jim Holt's new book? Why aren't you in it? JR: Why should I be? TTT: Ah, come on. He visited Parfit, Weinberg, Deutsch, Vilenkin. Why not you too?
JR: How do you know he didn't? TTT: Are you telling me? JR: Well, of course he wrote. And I said sure, come on out and we'll talk. And he did that. But in the end he decided not to use the material. TTT: But JR: Look, I'm the kind of gal who likes to speak her mind. He showed me his manuscript, and he asked me what I thought. I told him there were obvious weaknesses. He couldn't handle it. TTT: Weaknesses? Like what? JR: Where do I start? Okay, take Sartre.
JR: Hello, why do you think the female lead is called Jessica? Why do you think she hides the gun in her cleavage in Act 1? I was supposed to be playing her on the opening night. You should have seen the bit of hardware I was going to hide there.
The audience would have loved it. And then I came down sick and that flat-chested little tramp Marie Olivier got the glory instead. Even though she wrecked the key scene. But sorry, sorry, I'm getting off topic.
Sartre, terrific, world-class playwright, pretty good novelist, but as a philosopher, you know, nothing special TTT: Nothing special? Said he'd just embarrass himself. Was I right or was I right?
But Jim Holt, he just can't stop talking about it. And then on modal logic TTT: Modal logic? It isn't worth mentioning, it's like you need one second more compared to the original Anselm version to spot the obvious fallacy, but Jim just goes on about it. He should have more pride. And then Proust, he mentions Proust like four, five times, and in such trivial ways. I know everyone isn't as interested in Proust as I am, but honestly, if that's all you can think of to say about him then you shouldn't start.
I guess I shouldn't have told him that though. He looked kinda crushed. TTT: Well, you wouldn't have been Jessica if you'd kept quiet. JR: Hey thanks! But sometimes I think I could use more tact, you know? When you come down to it, the Sartre and the Proust, they were just, you know, irritating, because of my personal connections to them.
It was the cosmology that really did it. TTT: The Belgian priest-scientist? JR: That was Georges. I met him in when he came out to California, it was at a party at the Hubble place, and he was, you know, so cute and earnest with that round face and those glasses and that wonderful accent, I just totally fell for him. Such a shame he'd taken a vow of celibacy or there's no telling what could have happened. So yeah, he gets Georges wrong and then he talks about inflation and false vacuums like eight times and never goes into the least bit of detail about how the mechanism works.
In the end, I know this was kinda rude but I was riled up, I said Jim, do you really understand it? Because if you don't, I'm going to explain it to you now.
And I did, I remember Alan Guth telling it to me just after he'd found the original false vacuum construction like it was yesterday. And I took it slowly, step by step, and I said Jim, don't you see, in the false vacuum the metric is basically just the original de Sitter one so you get exponential expansion.
It's easy. TTT: I'm not sure I'm still following you JR: That's what he said too. And I said Jim, you have read de Sitter's paper, right? And you know what? He hadn't. Just had his head full of trivial philosophy. TTT: Uh JR: But that's not the worst part. He showed me his interview with Roger Penrose, I mean, Roger was doing him such a favor agreeing to talk to him in the first place, and all Jim could do was go on and on about neo-Platonism.
He'd read like the first chapter of The Road to Reality and he'd missed all the interesting passages where Roger's using thermodynamic arguments to undermine the validity of the inflationary approach. They could have had like this amazingly interesting discussion, and he totally fluffed it.
No wonder Roger made an excuse after half an hour. TTT: Talking of which JR: OMG, is that the time? I'm sorry, I really have to leave like five minutes ago, I hope you got everything you needed. And hey, I feel I've been such a bitch talking about Jim this way, I mean he's a nice guy and all and I'm sorry about his dog and his mother, but you know, he just totally pushes all my buttons.
As Jean-Paul would have said, c'est plus fort que moi. TTT: I understand, Jessica. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. And good luck with your new book.
JR: Thanks! It's been fun. View all 43 comments. Manny Well, that's not very smart. Well, that's not very smart. Jocaxx barcellos search on browser: "Jocaxian Nothingness" search on browser: "Jocaxian Nothingness" Jul 22, Daniel Bastian rated it it was amazing Shelves: reviewed. The secret to existence. The riddle of Being. That it hugs academic borders so closely and is so charged with ideological subtext are surely clues to its significance. No other question has battled against such a succession of brilliance and come away as unscathed.
In Why Does the World Exist? Have we at last solved the foggiest mystery of all? And like a bottle of Bordeaux, this one only gets better with age.
And Then There Was Time Most scientists through the late 20th century accepted the existence of the universe as a brute fact, with explanation outside the bounds of scientific inquiry. Unpacking its history—from its breathtaking early expansion to quasars and circumstellar disks—continued apace, but was regarded as distinct from the project taken up by Holt and his predecessors.
It was a matter of specialization, with science angled toward the how and philosophy shoveling below to the ultimate Whys. According to most cosmologists, the universe has a finite past, ultimately traceable to a singularity event roughly fourteen billion years ago. Though the precise nature of this event remains murky, we can infer from the redshift of distant galaxies and remnant radiation from the early universe the absolute age of all space and all time. This spatio-temporal boundary dictates what questions we can entertain.
In short, asking what happened before the Big Bang? We count this conceit as self-evident today, but it actually harks back to Leibniz, the 17th century polymath, who held that time is not absolute, but can only exist in a universe in which the relationship between mass and energy changes see relational theory.
Otherwise put, if time is not involved, events do not occur. If this view is correct, the singularity gave rise to time itself, beyond which the very concepts of cause and effect break down—along with our known laws of physics. Rather like a curtain that conceals the goings-on behind it, the Big Bang is a comprehensive model whose explanatory scope cuts off at the singularity.
Horizon or no, one does not need a crash course in the Big Bang-origin of spacetime to surmise that the singularity stands in need of explanation as well. Pointing up the latest advances in particle physics and cosmology, Krauss, Hawking and Michiu Kaku contend not only that our universe indeed came from nothing, but that we have pinned down the particular nothing from which it emerged. In A Universe From Nothing , Krauss sees it as an unstable vacuum state in which particles and antiparticles dart in and out of existence according to physical laws.
The physicist David Deutsch gives a strenuous defense of this point in his conversation with Holt. The quantum vacuum is a highly structured thing that obeys deep and complex laws of physics. Who or what determined them? For even a theory of everything would be part of the something to be explained.
More to the point, even if we were able to conclude, thanks to a more complete understanding of physics, that a cosmogonic singularity was inevitable given the fields, forces or fluctuations involved, we may still ask: why do we find ourselves in a universe or multiverse spawned by a vacuum state furnished with the ingredients necessary to wink it into existence?
Why not a different mixture of ingredients devoid of universe-issuing potential, or none at all? But the final theory of physics would still leave a residue of mystery—why this force, why this law? It would not contain within itself an answer to the question of why it was the final theory. So it would not live up to the principle that every fact must have an explanation—the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Brute Fact: Universe or God? One way out of this quagmire is to posit a supernatural intelligence that poofed the world into existence. It is valid as concerns the proximate question, but skirts the one underneath. If the universe needs a cause, does God not need one as well?
Philosophers and theologians have tussled with this dilemma in various ways. Aquinas rejected this outright , contending that no entity can cause itself because it would have to exist prior to itself—a logical contradiction.
Instead, he adduced the argument from contingency , which says that all causes depend on some prior cause, and since there cannot be an infinite series of causes they must terminate in a necessary, or non-contingent, being.
Holt finds these arguments problematic. And he is in good company; Hume, Kant and Russell had their suspicions as well, though for different reasons. Yet he himself has no ontological foundation. His essence does not include existence. His being is not logically necessary.
He might not have existed. There might have been no God, nothing at all. If the Universe requires something to create it, why not God? Likewise, if you want to say that God is uncaused and requires no explanation, on what non-arbitrary grounds can the Universe not exist uncaused and unexplained as well?
In the assertion 'X exists as a function of its own essence', neither term comes out obviously ahead. Both represent unique metaphysical claims, and both propositions can be derived through logical means.
Whatever new entities we might insert to fill the explanatory void ushers us right back to square one. We can throw up our hands, reject the aforesaid PSR and accept one or another brute fact, the balance of which tends to settle along ideological lines. The Road to Abstractification Having given the less exotic ideas a fair shake, Holt ventures off into ever more obscure pastures.
He dives under the currents of Platonism and the many colorful interpretations currently jostling for stature, such as the notion that math and morality have an external reality as opposed to being mere human constructions. Names, theories and seminal texts are dropped routinely, but not at random. Some of the answers he fields prove just as mysterious as the question itself.
From Dust to Dust Without a universe, there would be nothing to ask and no one to do the asking—no angst, no joy, no existential weariness. Holt wishes to remind us that things did not turn out this way. We are here, questions in hand, and this fact alone is of unexampled significance.
It is also what compels philosophers like Holt to obsess over the intellectual hunt. Holt remains content to bask in this greatest of mysteries, coveting a verdict yet wary of relinquishing his skepticism prematurely.
Perhaps our human perspective limits our ability to ask the right questions. Or, as equally disconcerting for someone who expects reimbursement for their intellectual labors, perhaps not every question has an answer. Alas, if there is ever to be an ultimate explanation of reality, how would we know we had found it? The intellectual rigor is interrupted as Holt grieves the death of his dog and later the loss of his mother, only to be picked up over lavish dinners at the local brasserie. His transitions from abstract argument to the definite realities of his own existence make this more than a pallid retread of ideas.
And given the ultimacy of the quest before us, is that not as much as we could expect? Note: This review is republished from my official website.
View all 14 comments. Aug 19, Lori rated it liked it Shelves: book-club. I haven't argued with a book as much as this one I was furious, outraged, bombastic. How can people get away with such partial and idiotic arguments, and how can anyone take them seriously.
The book irritated me, to say the least, and all I wanted to do was sit across a table from Holt and from everyone he interviewed except David Deutsch and Steven Weinberg and ask them if they were really kidding.
It's an unanswerable question, why there is something rather than nothing, and I haven't argued with a book as much as this one It's an unanswerable question, why there is something rather than nothing, and anyone who says they have the answer especially with certainty is suspect, to say the least and I'm trying hard to say the least, here.
With such an essentially and inherently unanswerable question, the question then becomes why are you asking it? What does it mean to you? What would the various answers mean to you? THOSE are the interesting questions. Recommended if you want to have an argument and there's no one around.
View all 15 comments. Jan 18, Ed rated it did not like it. This supremely unimportant book raises three deep and troubling questions. The first is: Why in blazes did I buy it? By way of apology more than explanation I did struggle with Heidigger in graduate school back in and thought this might be a good way to revive my earlier befuddlement.
Befuddlement revived? Good way? Not so much. The principle P explains why other laws hold true: because they have characteristic C. But what explains why P is true? Well, suppose that P turned out to have characteristic C.
Then the truth of P would logically follow from P itself! I am not a believer, but by the end of the book, the only chapter that made any sense at all was the one outlining a theological answer. Second: Why would anyone buy this book? Carrying around a copy of Why does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story might just do it. Could work, right? Or - maybe you just have trouble falling asleep. Third: Why all the personal details? Why do we care if Jim only finishes half a bottle of St.
Or eats biscuits and tea. I do, however, understand why he repeatedly reminds the reader that he was born and raised a Roman Catholic and, at an early age, rejected the faith. See, I can inject foreign phrases just like Jim. Coming soon to a kindle near you. One star? View all 4 comments. Jan 18, Chris Horsefield rated it liked it. The author considers all possible perspectives, a strategy which makes the discussion a bit vague and directionless in my opinion. Jan 12, Craig Werner rated it did not like it Shelves: religion-spirituality , science , philosophy.
This book came to me via the very positive New York Times Book Review review, and it made the Times list of best books of the year. Certianlyk the organizing question--why does the universe exist? Or at least I thought it was until I read the book. After reading it, I'm convinced that almost everyone who addresses it is deeply mired in circular thinking of the sort where the argument i This book came to me via the very positive New York Times Book Review review, and it made the Times list of best books of the year.
After reading it, I'm convinced that almost everyone who addresses it is deeply mired in circular thinking of the sort where the argument is determined in advance by the desired conclusion. Some of the people Holt talked to are familiar names in the worlds of philosophy and cosmology and I'll take his word that the others are Well Thought Of in their professional worlds.
Almost all come off as smug and self-important. And Holt simply drove me nuts. The chapters where he veers into his own speculations are simply awful. I think he was trying to provide a sense of an intellectual journey, but his attempts at synthesis are trite.
I got really tired of hearing about what he ate for dinner before he went to talk to the man of the moment. Some of the sketches of the interviewees are well drawn. But that's about it. What strikes me in retrospect is how sure the speakers are that the fundamental questions can be answered in rational, logical and fundamentally Western terms. I read a fair amount of eastern philosophy--Buddhism, Taoism--and on this question I radically prefer the humility and openness to wonder of the Tao Te Ching or Huang Po.
View all 3 comments. Nov 06, Riku Sayuj rated it it was ok Shelves: science-physics , books-about-books , science-gen , physics. Science cannot answer the deepest questions. As soon as you ask why there is something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science.
If you are curious to see how people like Parfit, Penrose, Weinberg and even Updike think outside of their books, some of the chapters here could be fun reads. And to be honest, after all the conversa Science cannot answer the deepest questions. And to be honest, after all the conversations with the Physicists, the one where Updike tries to sound all scienc-ey feels a bit, what can I say, philistine?
To be honest, this is as much as you will get from the book. After all the author had no real hope of tackling his real objective, and we know it all along. Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. View all 6 comments. Even with some limitations, this was a very stimulating book to read. Inconclusive as any such book must be, so don't pick it up expecting one definitive version of an answer.
I enjoyed this book a great deal. It's a bit self-indulgent, with lots of little segues where Holt sits around drinkin' and thinkin' at the same Paris cafe where Sartre wrote Being and Nothinginess or soaking in a bathtub in the Athenaeum club, but they add a few much-needed downbeats to what might have been a somewhat gru Even with some limitations, this was a very stimulating book to read. It's a bit self-indulgent, with lots of little segues where Holt sits around drinkin' and thinkin' at the same Paris cafe where Sartre wrote Being and Nothinginess or soaking in a bathtub in the Athenaeum club, but they add a few much-needed downbeats to what might have been a somewhat gruelling book otherwise.
Basically, Holt meets a bunch of a white male, mainly English-speaking philosophers and scientists and quizzes them on their ideas about why reality exists. He's so white-Anglophone-guy-oriented that he even speaks to John Updike because apparently Updike once read about the quantum fluctuation model of how the universe happened and used it as a way for a fellow in a novel to mock the fellow who may have cuckolded him. It would have been nice if Holt had met people outside of his chosen demographic.
I don't say this because of a need for political correctness but because of the simple fact that surely there are more kind of people with something valuable to contribute, and not everyone here has anything valuable to contribute John Leslie and that theologian bloke for instance; and nobody in the world needs to know what Woody Allen thinks about anything, okay?
Anyway, Holt is no Alain de Botton, he actually gets into the issues at hand with some rigour and avoids glib answers that explain nothing. I am not sure if he gets all the cosmology right, but he presents the philosophy interestingly and gives you a good grand tour of the issue. What I found most interesting is what the book revealed about my own leanings. Intellectually, I feel that philosophy has as good a chance of answering the basic question of existence as science; I even think that the Buddhist monk briefly glimpsed in the epilogue may be the only person who does not offer a basically circular answer.
But I feel emotionally drawn to the idea that existence simply tunneled out of nothingness as a consequence of quantum fluctuation. I also sometimes suspect that there may some questions we may never be able to answer because we are too fundamentally embedded in the topic being investigated to contextualise it accurately enough to frame a useful, answerable question.
Sep 12, Paula Koneazny rated it liked it Shelves: non-fiction. An exuberant romp of a book. The author won't even get to the bottom of what exactly "nothing" IS. Midway through the book, however, I began to wonder why all the philosophers, scientists or simply very smart peop An exuberant romp of a book. So, he wasn't forced by lack of funds, time, or physical disability from seeking answers further afield. Even if he were limited to New York City, his home base, there must be a goodly supply of female thinkers in that city alone.
I have to assume that an exclusionary principle operated at the level of personal inclination, or disinclination, as it were. Such thoughts did spoil the fun a bit, I must admit. Jan 25, fleurette added it Shelves: non-fiction , dnf. Why, oh, why I did it to myself?! Okay, so I generally know why and there are several reasons for this. Although none is good enough for me to read this book to the end.
First of all, and it made me borrow this book from the library at all, I desperately needed this book for one of my reading challenges. It is a challenge that I would love to finish as soon as possible, preferably this year. And unfortunately it turns out that I can do it faster by reading books that I usually don't read, outside Why, oh, why I did it to myself?! And unfortunately it turns out that I can do it faster by reading books that I usually don't read, outside my usual comfort zone.
Sometimes that's good. I have read several books that I would not otherwise read, at least not now. But unfortunately it didn't work in this case. I never liked philosophy. I avoided it as much as I could, and throughout my studies I chose all the other possible classes to avoid philosophy. I almost succeeded, only when I got my PhD I had to pass the philosophy exam. But it's also true that when I do something of my own choice, and not because I need it for school or university, I often like it a lot more.
So I thought I would give this philosophical book a try. Thanks to this exam I passed I know some basics. I'm in no hurry. I have plenty of time to read this book. Nobody will question me about it. I can read it slowly and who knows, I may even like it. Or so I thought. And it even promised to be a good book.
Such a little science for the uninitiated. You know, philosophical detective story I was expecting something well-written, which will allow me to finally immerse myself in philosophy and have some fun while doing on the way. But unfortunately, it's still a philosophical book, and I still hate philosophy. And this book not only cites extensive quotes from many famous philosophers, but also strongly relates to religion and the issue of God's existence. And if there is something I don't like as much as philosophy, it's theology.
The combination of the two had to end in failure for me. This book was a kind of experiment for me. I wanted to know if I would be able to enjoy a book about philosophy if I chose it of my own free will and if it was a popularized version. And my experiment brought a clear result. The hypothesis has been refuted. I still hate philosophy and can't read a book about philosophy for pleasure.
I decided not to rate this book, since obviously it is my fault that I didn't like it.
0コメント