The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far

by Lawrence M. Krauss

  For those who enjoy horror stories, another, even more gruesome possibility has been suggested. An instability might exist that would cause the Higgs field to continue to grow in magnitude indefinitely. As a result of such growth, the energy stored by the evolving Higgs field could become negative. This could cause the entire universe to collapse once again in a cataclysmic reversal of the Big Bang—a Big Crunch. Happily the data disfavor such a possibility, as poetic as it might seem.

  In the scenario in which everything we now see disappears as the Higgs makes a sudden transition to a new ground state, I want to stress that the Higgs mass, as now measured, favors stability but has sufficient uncertainty in its value to fall on either side of this line—either producing the apparently stable vacuum that we are now flourishing in, or favoring such a transition. Moreover, this scenario is based on calculations within the Standard Model alone. Any new physics that might be discovered at the LHC or beyond could change the picture entirely, stabilizing what could otherwise be an unstable Higgs field. Since we are reasonably certain there is new physics to be discovered, there is no cause for despair at present.

  If that isn’t consolation enough, for those who still fear that the ultimate future of the universe might be the more miserable one I have just described, the same calculations that suggest this may happen also suggest that our current metastable configuration of reality would persist for not merely billions of years into the future, but billions of billions of billions of years.

  Concerns about the future notwithstanding, now is an appropriate time to once again emphasize that the universe doesn’t give a damn what we would like or whether we survive. Its dynamics continue independently of whether we exist or not. For this reason I am strangely attracted to the doomsday scenario I have just described. In this case, the remarkable accident that is responsible for our existence—the condensation of a field that allows the current stability of matter, atoms, and life itself—is seen as a short-term bit of good luck.

  The imaginary scientists living on the spine of an ice crystal on the windowpane that I described earlier would first discover that one direction in their universe was particularly special (which would no doubt be celebrated by the theologians in such a society as an example of God’s love). Digging deeper, they might discover that this special circumstance is just an accident and that other ice crystals can exist in which other directions are favored.

  And so, we too have discovered that our universe, with its forces and particles and amazing Standard Model that results in the remarkable good fortune of an expanding universe with stars and planets and life that can evolve a consciousness, is also a simple accident made possible because the Higgs field condensed in just the way it did as the universe evolved early on.

  And even as the imaginary scientists on the hypothetical ice crystal might celebrate their discoveries as we are wont to do, they might also be unaware that the Sun is about to rise and that soon their ice crystal will melt, and all traces of their brief existence will disappear. Would this have made the thrill of their brief existence less enthralling? Certainly not. If our future is similarly fleeting, we can at least enjoy the wild ride we have taken and relish every aspect of the greatest story ever told . . . so far.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  COSMIC HUMILITY

  For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

  —GENESIS 3:19

  “These are the tears of things, and the stuff of our mortality cuts us to the heart.”

  So said Virgil as he penned the first great epic story of the classical era. They are the words I chose to use as the epigraph of this book because the story I wanted to tell not only contains every bit as much drama, human tragedy, and exaltation, but it is ultimately motivated by a similar purpose.

  Why do we do science? Surely it is in part so that we can have greater control of our environment. By understanding the universe better we can predict the future with greater accuracy, and we can build devices that might change the future—hopefully for the better.

  But ultimately I believe we are driven to do science because of a primal urge we have to better understand our origins, our mortality, and ultimately ourselves. We are hardwired to survive by solving puzzles, and that evolutionary advantage has, over time, allowed us the luxury of wanting to solve puzzles of all sorts—even those less pressing than how to find food or to escape from a lion. What puzzle is more seductive than the puzzle of our universe?

  Humanity didn’t have a choice in its evolution. We find ourselves alive on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old in a galaxy that is 12 billion years old, in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe with at least a hundred billion galaxies that is expanding ever faster into a future we cannot yet predict.

  So what do we do with this information? Is there special significance here for understanding our human story? In the midst of this cosmic grandeur and tragedy, how can we reconcile our own existence?

  For most people, the central questions of existence ultimately come down to transcendental ones: Why is there a universe at all? Why are we here?

  Whatever presumptions one might bring to the question “Why?,” if we understand the “how” better, “why” will come into sharper focus. I wrote my last book to address what science has to say about the first of the above questions. The story I have related here provides what I think is the best answer to the second.

  Faced with the mystery of our existence, we have two choices. We can assume we have special significance and that somehow the universe was made for us. For many, this is the most comfortable choice. It was the choice made by early human tribes, who anthropomorphized nature because it provided them some hope of understanding what otherwise seemed to be a hostile world often centered on suffering and death. It is the choice made by almost all the world’s religions, each of which has its own claimed solution to the quandary of existence.

  This choice of which tale to embrace has led to one culture’s sacred book, the New Testament, which has sometimes been called “the greatest story ever told”—the story of that civilization’s putative discovery of its own divinity. Yet when I witness wars and killing based on which prayers we are supposed to recite, which persons we are supposed to marry, or which prophet is the appropriate one to follow, I cannot help but be reminded, once again, of Gulliver, who discovered societies warring over which way God had intended man to break an egg.

  The second choice when addressing these transcendental mysteries is to make no assumption in advance about the answer. Which leads to another story. One that I think is more humble. In this story we evolve in a universe whose laws exist independently of our own being. In this story we check the details to see if they might be wrong. In this story we are going to be surprised at every turn.

  The story I have written here describes a human drama as much as a universal one. It describes the boldest intellectual quest humans have ever undertaken. It even has scriptural allegories, for those who prefer them. We wandered in the desert for forty years after the development of the Standard Model before we discovered the Promised Land. The truth, or at least as much of the truth as we now know, was revealed to us in what for most people seems to be incomprehensible scribbles: the mathematics of gauge theories. These have not been delivered to us on golden tablets by an angel, but rather by much more practical means: on pieces of paper in laboratory notebooks filled through the hard work of a legion of individuals who knew that their claims could be tested by whether they correctly modeled the real world, the world of observation and experiment. But as significant as the manner by which we got here is that we have gotten this far.

  At this point in the story, what can we conclude about why we are here? The answer seems all the more remarkable because it reveals explicitly just how deeply the universe of our experience is a shadow of reality.

  I also began this book with a quote from the naturalist J. A. Baker, from The Peregrine: “The hardest thing of all to see is what is rea
lly there.” I did so because the story I have told is the most profound example of this wise observation that I know of.

  I next described Plato’s Allegory of the Cave because I know of no better or more lyrical representation of the actual history of science. The triumph of human existence has been to escape the chains that our limited senses have imposed upon us. To intuit that beneath the world of our experience lies a reality that is often far stranger. It is a reality whose mathematical beauty may be unimpeachable, but a reality in which our existence becomes—more than we might ever have imagined in advance—a mere afterthought.

  If we now ask why things are the way they are, the best answer we can suggest is that it is the result of an accident in the history of the universe in which a field froze in empty space in a certain way. When we ponder what significance that might have, we might equally ponder what is the significance of that specific ice crystal seen in the early-morning frost on a windowpane. The rules that allowed us to come into being seem no more worth fighting and dying for than it would seem to be to fight and die to resolve whether “up” in the ice-crystal universe is better than “down,” or whether it is better to crack an egg from the top or the bottom.

  Our primitive ancestors survived in large part because they recognized that nature could be hostile and violent, even as it was remarkable. The progress of science has made it clear just how violent and hostile the universe can be for life. But recognizing this does not make the universe less amazing. Such a universe has ample room for awe, wonder, and excitement. If anything, recognition of these facts gives us greater reason to celebrate our origins, and our survival.

  To argue that, in a universe in which there seems to be no purpose, our existence is itself without meaning or value is unparalleled solipsism, as it suggests that without us the universe is worthless. The greatest gift that science can give us is to allow us to overcome our need to be the center of existence even as we learn to appreciate the wonder of the accident we are privileged to witness.

  Light played a major role in our story, as it did in Plato’s allegory. Our changing perception of light led us to a changing understanding of the essence of space and time. Ultimately that changing perception made it clear that even this messenger of reality that is so essential to us and our existence is itself merely a fortunate consequence of a cosmic accident. An accident that may someday be rectified.

  It is appropriate here to recognize that the line in the Aeneid that follows the epigraph with which this book began was the hopeful cry “Release your fear.” A future that might bring about our end does not negate the majesty of the journey we are still taking.

  The story I have told is not the whole story. There is likely to be far more that we don’t understand than what we now do. In the search for meaning, our understanding of reality will surely change as the story continues to unfold. I am often told that science can never do some things. Well, how do we know until we try?

  As fate would have it, I am writing these final words while sitting at the desk at which my late friend and coconspirator in the battle against myth and superstition Christopher Hitchens wrote his masterpiece, God Is Not Great. It is hard not to feel his presence channeling these words, even as I know he would be the first to remind me that such feelings arise from inside my head, and not from anything more cosmically significant. Yet the title of his book emphasizes that human stories, which he loved so dearly and described so brilliantly, pale in comparison to the story that nature has driven us to discover. And so the human stories about God also pale in comparison to the real “greatest story ever told.”

  This story ultimately does not give the past special significance. We can reflect upon and even celebrate the road we have taken, but the greatest liberation, and the greatest solace that science provides, come from perhaps its greatest lesson: that the best parts of the story can yet be written.

  Surely this possibility makes the cosmic drama of our existence worthwhile.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is written in part as a tribute to all of those who have helped bring our understanding of the universe to the place it is today. Because I wanted to properly and appropriately represent the science, and the history, to help me check both I turned to a number of my colleagues after I finished the first version of this book. I received comments and useful suggestions and corrections in response, and I want to thank both Sheldon Glashow and Wally Gilbert for their suggestions, as well as Richard Dawkins, and I am particularly indebted to one of the colleagues I admire most for his contributions as a scientist and his scientific integrity, who would rather remain anonymous, for his careful reading of the manuscript, and the numerous corrections he proposed. Beyond the science, I turned to a friend and one of the writers I admire most, who is also a wonderful student of science, for his thoughts on the manuscript. Cormac McCarthy, who amazingly volunteered to copyedit the paperback version of my earlier book Quantum Man, again went through every single page of the manuscript he received, with comments and suggestions to, in his words, “make the book perfect.” I cannot presume that it now is, but I can say that it is much better thanks to his kindness, wisdom, and talent.

  This book would never have been written if determining a publisher hadn’t been skillfully managed by my new agent and old friend John Brockman and his staff, and happily it worked out that my editor for this book was my editor for A Universe from Nothing, Leslie Meredith at Atria Books. Leslie is not only a kindred spirit, but was a wonderful foil off of which to bounce the ideas in this book. She helped force me to make various discussions of the science clearer, even when I thought they were already clear, and she encouraged me not to back off from my strong views on the need for scientists to speak out about scientific nonsense.

  When I faced the arduous task of exploring a variety of significant revisions in the final draft, I knew that I could seek safety, support, and solitude in the home that my wonderful wife, Nancy, who has saved me and inspired me more times than I can count, has made for us, and that my stepdaughter, Santal, would quietly tolerate the sound of my typing in my study, right above her bedroom, late at night. My staff at the Origins Project, in particular my executive director and right-hand woman, Amelia Huggins, and my longtime executive assistant at Arizona State University, Jessica Strycker, pitched in to provide me the support and time I needed when I had to take time out from my day job to work on this book. And my Phoenix friends Thomas Houlon and Patty Barnes, who encouraged me on this book and others, have, over many breakfasts, given their feedback on a number of the presentations I developed as I was writing the book.

  Finally, as I was approaching the last push, my friend Carol Blue, Christopher Hitchens’s widow, and her father, Edwin Blue, offered me use of a guesthouse where Christopher had written many essays and books, including his wonderful book God Is Not Great. I cannot think of a more inspiring place to have finished, and I can only hope the final version carries with it even a small fraction of the eloquence that so characterized Christopher’s writing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lawrence M. Krauss is director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University and Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Physics Department there. Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist with wide research interests, including the interface between elementary-particle physics and cosmology, where his studies include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity, and neutrino astrophysics. He has investigated questions ranging from the nature of exploding stars to issues of the origin of all mass in the universe. He has won numerous international awards for both his research and his efforts to improve the public understanding of science. Krauss is the only physicist to have received the top awards from all three US physics societies: the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the American Association of Physics Teachers, and in 2012 he was awarded the National Science Board’s prestigious Public Service Awar
d for his many contributions to public education and the understanding of science around the world. Among his other honors are the 2013 Roma Award, from the city of Rome, and the 2015 Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association.

  Krauss is the author of more than three hundred scientific publications, as well as numerous popular articles on science and current affairs. He is a commentator and essayist for periodicals such as the New York Times and the New Yorker and appears regularly on radio, on television, and on film. Krauss served as executive producer and subject of The Unbelievers, a documentary film that discusses science and reason with Richard Dawkins. He also appears in Werner Herzog’s new films Salt and Fire and Lo and Behold. Krauss is the author of ten popular books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Physics of Star Trek (1995) and A Universe from Nothing (2012).

  Krauss is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He serves as the chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is on the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Scientists. He helped found ScienceDebate, which in 2008, 2012, and 2016 helped raise issues of science and sound public policy in the presidential elections in those years. Hailed by Scientific American as a rare scientific public intellectual, Krauss has dedicated his time, throughout his career, to issues of science and society and has helped spearhead national efforts to educate the public about science, ensure sound public policy, and defend science against attacks at a variety of levels.

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