When I was young, I once looked at a box of cereal and had an epiphany. “Why is that cereal there?” A universe of unfathomable complexity, with 100,000,000,000 galaxies, each with 100,000,000,000 stars, making 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible solar systems with planets around them—all that, and I’m sitting across from a box of Vanilly Crunch?
Since that existential crisis, I’ve always wondered why there was something instead of nothing. Why isn’t the universe just one big empty set? “Emptiness” and “nothingness” have always seemed so perfect to me, so symmetric, that our very existence seems at once both arbitrary and ugly. And no theologian or philosopher ever gave me an answer I thought was satisfying. For a while, I thought physicists were on the right track: Hawking and Mlodinow, for example, in The Grand Design, describe how universes can spontaneously appear (from nothing) according to the laws of quantum mechanics.
I have no problem with quantum mechanics: it is arguably the most successful theory devised by mankind. And I agree that particles can spontaneously create themselves out of a vacuum. But here’s where I think Hawking and Mlodinow are wrong: the rules of physics themselves do not constitute “nothing”. The rules are something. “Nothing” to me implies no space, no time, no Platonic forms, no rules, no physics, no quantum mechanics, no cereal at my breakfast table. Why isn’t the universe like that? And if the universe were like that, how could our current universe create itself without any rules for creation?
But wait—don’t look so smug, theologians. Saying that an omnipotent God created the universe doesn’t help in any way. That just passes the buck; shifts the stack by one. For even if you could prove to me that a God existed, I would still feel a sense of existential befuddlement. Why does God herself exist? Nothingness still seems more plausible.
Heidegger called “why is there anything?” the fundamental question of philosophy. Being a physicist, and consequently being full of confidence and hubris, I set out to answer the question myself. I’d love to blog my conclusions, but the argument runs about 50,000 words…longer than The Great Gatsby. Luckily for you, however, my book Why Is There Anything? is now available for the Kindle on Amazon.com:
You can download the book here.
You might wonder if my belief in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics affected my thinking on this matter. Well, the opposite is true. In my journey to answer the question “why is there anything?” I became convinced of MWI, in part because of the ability of MWI to partially answer the ultimate question. My book Why Is There Anything? is a sort of chronicle of my intellectual journey, one that I hope you will find entertaining, enlightening, and challenging.
Many Worlds Theory 
I might just pick it up–as soon as I finish reading Krauss’s “A Universe from Nothing.”
Excellent! Congratulations on the book. Now i just need to buy myself a Kindle
Excellent book, Matt. For those who have iPads, there is a free Kindle app that works fine. You download the book from the Amazon site on your web browser and the iPad Kindle app imports it automatically.
It certainly is a fascinating read. Makes me look back fondly on the college days thinking nothing but physics (well not quite nothing, heh). The Kindle app David Martino mentioned is also available for the Surface RT, Surface Pro and other platforms so a Kindle is not required.
It looks precisely like the kind of book I’d like to read. Unfortunately, here in China kindles and kindle-format books are forbidden, so I’ll have to wait until I’m in Europe!
Reading your blog I see you already mentioned my main argument, which I believe originated with Max Tegmark. I just wanted to present the zero information/multiple universe argument for a wider lay audience.
You blog is great, by the way.
Thanks! I’m just glad I found a fellow physicist to share jokes with. With Elkement that makes 3 of us…
I have just purchased it 🙂
It may take a while, however, until I have finished some of the other books I am reading in parallel 😉 I am a victim of too many book recommendations by various WordPress bloggers these days.
I have finished reading your book now – and I have really enjoyed it!
Though I was familiar with many ideas in the book I did not know the zero information/multiple universe argument.You have a talent of presenting many different concepts (related to philosophy, math and physics) in a consice, but still understandable and entertaining way! I would also recommend your book to anybody who is familiar with all the ideas presented as it adds this fresh “Feynman-style” perspective.
I am big fan of the dialogue format – e.g. I like Scott Adam’s God’s Debris and the dialogues in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Thanks! I appreciate it.
hello, that is a ok article.
Hi Matthew,
Warm greetings and peace.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I find your response to why is there anything to be interesting.
I have a different view that I hope to share with you.
You are intelligent and I take for granted as open-minded.
I hope you find it fruitful.
Even if everything can be like nothing in some informational sense, it is still not identical to it.
Therefore, the question of why everything exist instead of absolute nothing is still not resolved and in principle can never be resolved. because only something necessary can resolve it but if there is nothing necessary, then there is no solution.
In other words, boiling down the possible answers to two (nothing or everything) makes great progress but it still falls short of answering it.
I find God as a word to mean the perfect one, Being itself, to provide an ultimate answer since if God exists, He is necessary by definition, and anything necessary answers the question why something rather than nothing…..because God is necessary….not due to chance but due to His perfect nature…..in other words think of God as being the “true” everything since even beyond the many worlds theory…..the many worlds theory is not literally everything because if it was, then it would include God, the necessary being, but that would be self defeating to the many world theory since it assumes there is no God.
So I think better than the many worlds theory is the same thing in an informational sense with nothing is God.
But also empirically I find God to make more sense because we could have existed in an infinite other universes with less order like we could have existed in a universe with 17 wispy pieces of hair next to us or 76,9845 pieces of hair or 897,677734 yellowish green pieces of crud or a zillion and 76 pieces of slightly off white pieces of dirt or……
so out of literally infinite different universes, we find ourselves in one where we see intricate fine-tuned order, beauty, moral sense, other beings with self consciousness with whom we can relate, etc….and revelations like the Bible and Qur’an that speak of God.
All these and more empirical data converge to God.
Finally, the many worlds theory as I understand it is not just that it an everything exists and no questions asked but that it is exists within a specific formulation of quantum equations…these equations are specific arrangements of numbers which could have instead been a different set of equations and thus not absolutely simple like God as the ultimate cause.
Instead of everything existing and no questions asked, MWI relies on a uniquely specified mechanism….and mechanism by definition is incompatible with simplicity.
In other words, if we experienced everything popping into and out of existence in a random way, then it would be more plausible but even if we assume that everything exists, if is does so via quantum mechanics rather than just popping in and out with no mathematical way to model the mother equation, it is still wanting for the answer to why something rather than nothing unlike the absolute simplicity of God which provides a truly ultimate explanation.
Peace and Best
What is your definition of God? Saying “God” did it doesn’t solve anything, since you haven’t explained where God came from…you’ve punted the ball further down the field.