"Ellis: Well this was just echoing what you have already said: many of the possible high-energy physics experiments and astronomy observations relevant to cosmology are now in essence nearly complete. "

what an incredibly bold and empty-headed thing to say. He talks about how because we've "mapped" out the universe, the rest is just details. But those details are actually big big questions about how the universe works and could potentially lead to even bigger mysteries and questions. Dark matter for one, life elsewhere for another. I can't belief there would be a practicing scientist who would openly state that our picture of both the big and small was "nearly complete". So to saying this very opening statement sent off alarms bells about him for me is a bit of an understatement.

I also think he's being very dishonest with the Lawrence Strauss critique. He's harping on the pre-existence point but I don't think Lawrence Strauss is concerned with that at all, just the nature of the universe we have now. You don't need to prove
any pre-existence form of physics to observe what is happening now, and the question of how the big bang came to be, what may have came before (personally think this is just a human semantic, there is no "before") is another large question of cosmology that is not "nearly complete". He harps on the "physics knowing all of reality" by compounding it with a bunch of different fields; biological, psychological, sociological (sorry, what is the "physical" reality?) but that's asking a bit much. Strauss is concerned with the physics that makes the universe GO, not so much the smaller details at the life level.

"Many scientists are strong reductionists who believe that physics alone determines outcomes in the real world, This is demonstrably untrue – for example the computer on which I am writing this could not possibly have come into being through the agency of physics alone."

This is a pretty big statement made in bad faith and it's shameful he seriously said it.

"As I stated above, mathematical equations only represent part of reality, and should not be confused with reality. A specific related issue: there is a group of people out there writing papers based on the idea that physics is a computational process. But a physical law is not an algorithm."

Here I think he is getting it backwards. We interpret physical phenomena through mathematics, it is not that the language of mathematics we use is embedded in the universe. It's simply the lens through which we see these things, and sometimes that lens is incomplete or doesn't match up. So far it's worked out and what point he is even trying to make with the rest of this paragraph is confounding. What's behind it all? Well, that'd be another big question of cosmology right?

Overall I think this guy is trying to take a broader view than what we're ready for atm. While a lot of scientists currently focus on a field and specialize, he's trying to tackle a bunch and figure out how they're unified (in his article alone he mentions cosmology, physics, biology, neuroscience, mathematics, physiology, sociology, psychology, and others). While it's great to be looking forward, I don't think any time a scientist makes a statement or discovery that responding with "well that doesn't explain X or Y" makes him a very good scientist.

I don't get why this is so good.

Chairman,

I won't say much about your first point, because it strikes me as largely a matter of taste. I would point out, though, that the presence of life elsewhere in the universe, which you highlight as an open problem, has nothing to do with cosmology and high-energy physics as usually defined (which are what he's talking about). I agree with you that he is too cavalier in ignoring dark matter as a big remaining issue.

But I can say with confidence, having followed the discussion closely, that you're completely wrong about Krauss (not Strauss). Krauss claimed to have solved the philosophical problem of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (not just to have discovered properties of this universe). He was roundly and justly mocked throughout the philosophy community, and obdurately insisted that they were all fools. Ellis is perfectly right on this point, which is an elementary one.

Maybe you could enlighten us a bit more. I think it'd be strange for the philosophy community, which by practice works on thought experiments and exploring areas with non-evidence, would come out and mock another scientist for philosophizing from his own field of work. I've seen the Universe from Nothing lecture (not sure if he makes all the entirety of his points there) and it makes some good observations I find, but nothing that seems to make the claim to know the true origins of the universe.

by enlighten I mean link to some material of course

You can start here, with a review of Krauss's book by the philosopher/physicist David Albert. There was a great deal more activity after this. A google search should turn up a lot. You can also search (e.g.) Peter Woit's blog, which collected a lot of the action.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

I think the point is rather the opposite. Krauss made a fool out of himself mocking philosophy and yet engages in philosophy himself without recognizing it.

Also, you're wrong about the philosophy community -- they don't at all restrict themselves to non-evidence. The right interpretation of evidence is squarely a concern of philosophy. Moreover, Krauss was not within "his own field of work." He was claiming to have answered a philosophical problem that he clearly didn't even understand.

I dont know. This review doesnt sit right with me. A couple of points:

"Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed."

"Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.”

So the claim in the very opening paragraph is blatantly wrong. Okay...? Krauss isn't claiming total knowledge here, more speculative or working knowledge

"He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place"

Now I could be wrong about this paragraph. I've read it a few times over, but I don't think they are disagreeing here. Albert is making the same point as Krauss.

He's talking about the idea of 'quantum vacuum' over the idealized 'nothing'. Quantum vacuum would be, as Albert describes earlier in the interview, as the absence of the a field. The arrangement of a field where there appears to be nothing (but we know, now, is just an arrangement, a temporary state of the field). Krauss himself states in his lecture that there is no true vacuum, just a kind of bubbling, boiling background of quantum fields popping in and out. These don't seem to be at odds. The "vacuum" shifts between there being fields and there being the absence of fields, like a wave and its trough.

The idealized 'nothing' would be the idea of totally zilch. No quantum fields, no nothing, a sort of In The Beginning state before anything.

The idealized nothing would have been what we thought was true before. We know now that something like a 'quantum vacuum' is more accurate. Again, I don't see how Albert is refuting or disagreeing with Krauss here, as Krauss clearly believes a quantum vacuum is more correct than the idealized nothing.

Again, I could be wrong, but that's my reading of it. I would like to read more on this though, just because it's seemed to pass me by. Now, I could go ahead and google a bunch of things, but my terms and articles I bring up are going to be vastly different than whatever context you saw them in. Which is why I was asking YOU to post content related to this matter, so I can get the context that YOU are reading it in, not some context-less aimless google searching hoping to hit a properly written article or refutation.

to expand on that second point, Krauss seems to be railing against religious critics and theologians who want their cake and to eat it to. They simultaneously want to work with both a 'quantum vacuum' and an idealized 'nothing' idea. Albert seems to miss this and believes the two can be true, but then goes on to say we know now that the idealized 'nothing' of history was wrong and that 'we know more now.'

Thank you for the link, I liked the piece. Just two or three things:

1) Unlike Chairman I am sympathetic to this statement:

"Many scientists are strong reductionists who believe that physics alone determines outcomes in the real world, This is demonstrably untrue – for example the computer on which I am writing this could not possibly have come into being through the agency of physics alone."

Unfortunately this is all too true. I believe it was actually Dennet who coined the term ''greedy reductionism''. I am normally loath to agree with Dennet, but on this occasion, from my perspective, he hits the nail squarely on the head.

2) The argument from first cause, stands every bit as much today as when Aquinas via Aristotle and Al Ghazali made it. The critique of Krauss stands.

3) ''Attempts to explain values in terms of neuroscience or evolutionary theory in fact have nothing whatever to say about what is good or bad.''

Yes absolutely, indeed, as I understand it, that same logical position is also taken by the deterministic atheist - perfectly logical.

@Chairman,

I think you may still be missing what's going on. Let's start with your first paragraph:

"So the claim in the very opening paragraph is blatantly wrong. Okay...? Krauss isn't claiming total knowledge here, more speculative or working knowledge"

No, wrong. *At the end of his book,* Krauss admits in a parenthetical that he has nothing to say on where the quantum fields came from. On the COVER of his book, though, and in the introduction, and throughout, he claims to have solved the problem of why there is something rather than nothing. The point is that his parenthetical admission at the end is -- without his acknowleding it -- an admission that he completely failed in what he claimed he would do.

"Now I could be wrong about this paragraph. I've read it a few times over, but I don't think they are disagreeing here. Albert is making the same point as Krauss."

No he's not. Krauss is saying that in the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" he should be able to define "nothing" as "empty space" because that's how they might have defined it 100 years ago. Albert is pointing out that "nothing" means "nothing," and if we've now learned that empty space is not nothing but something (because it contains vacuum fields), then empty space does NOT quality as "nothing," and so an explanation that BEGINS by assuming empty space's existence is not in any sense an explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. It is just an explanation of why space, if it exists, is not empty.

At issue is whether Krauss has solved the problem he says he has. He hasn't, because he's using a stupid definition of "nothing" that nobody cares about who is interested in that philosophical problem; and then he's attacking them for caring about the wrong problem.

"to expand on that second point, Krauss seems to be railing against religious critics and theologians who want their cake and to eat it to. They simultaneously want to work with both a 'quantum vacuum' and an idealized 'nothing' idea."

No, Krauss is railing against religious critics because they are defining "nothing" as "nothing, including no quantum fields," even though 100 years ago, they might not have. This is not having their cake and eating it too; it's realizing that their forebears shouldn't have had their cake 100 years ago, because we've learned new things about the universe.

"ow, I could go ahead and google a bunch of things, but my terms and articles I bring up are going to be vastly different than whatever context you saw them in. Which is why I was asking YOU to post content related to this matter, so I can get the context that YOU are reading it in, not some context-less aimless google searching hoping to hit a properly written article or refutation."

If you search, for example. the phrase "Lawrence Krauss David Albert" (without quotation marks), you'll come up with plenty. Here's a summary example. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4623