• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Our universe is one whose basic physical constants—the gravitational constant, the size of the positive and negative charges on electrons and protons, the ratio of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces—have allowed it to last a long time (by our standards). It still shows no sign of collapsing. It has been around long enough to produce its 70 sextillion stars after about 13 billion years. On one minor rock circling one below-average star, it resulted in us Homo sapiens and some other stuff. One remarkable thing about this best current cosmological theory is the degree to which physicists have been able to subject it to many empirical tests, including tests of its claims about things that happened even before the big bang, let alone before the formation of Earth, our sun, or even our galaxy, the Milky Way. One of the most striking was the successful prediction of where to look for radiation from stars that went supernova and exploded as far back as 10 billion years ago. These tests came out so favorably to the big-bang theory that physicists decided to risk several billion euros on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), outside Geneva, to test the big-bang theory directly by creating the very conditions that occurred just after the big bang.

The multiverse theory seems to provide an opportunity seized upon by wishful thinkers, theologians, and their fellow travelers among the physicists and philosophers. First they ask, “If our universe is just one of many in a multiverse, where did the multiverse come from? And where did the multiverse’s cause come from, and where did its cause come from?” And so on, ad infinitum. Once they have convinced themselves and others that this series of questions has no stopping point in physics, they play what they imagine is a trump card, a question whose only answer they think has to be the God hypothesis.

It is certainly true that if physics has to move back farther and farther in the regress from universe to multiverse to something that gave rise to the multiverse, to something even more basic than that, it will never reach any point labeled “last stop, all off” (or rather “starting point” for all destinations). By the same token, if it has to move down to smaller and more fundamental components of reality than even fermions or bosons, it won’t ever know whether it has reached the “basement level” of reality. At this point, the theologians and mystery-mongering physicists play their trump card. It doesn’t matter whether there are infinite regresses in these two lines of inquiry or finite ones. Either way, they insist, physics can’t answer the question, Why is there anything at all? or as the question is famously put, Why is there something rather than nothing?

Physics, especially quantum physics, shows that the correct answer to this question is: No reason, no reason at all. Things could have turned out differently. There could have been nothing at all. Our universe is just one of those random events that “sometimes” occur and at other “times” don’t (“times” in quotes because quantum cosmology is going to eventually explain time, along with space, as a feature generated by the multiverse). The same goes for fermions and bosons. Their existence is just the way the cookie of quantum randomness crumbled. The fundamental constituents of matter and fields could have turned out differently. They could have been the antimatter versions of these particles. There could have been nothing at all. Why is that?

A hundred years ago, it became clear that most events at the level of the subatomic are random, uncaused, indeterministic quantum events—merely matters of probability. Locate an electron on one side of a steel barrier it doesn’t have the energy to penetrate. There is some probability that the next time you detect it, the electron will be on the other side of the barrier it can’t penetrate. But there are no facts about the electron that explain why sometimes it does this