Krass Krauss

Fysikeren Lawrence Krauss virker ikke helt overbegeistret for filosofi for tiden, skal vi dømme etter et intervju i The Atlantic.

Noe som selvsagt har ingenting å gjøre med responsen på hans seneste bok,  A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.

Selv om han nok ikke helt overraskende nok ikke helt har forstått responsen helt nok.

Your book argues that physics has definitively demonstrated how something can come from nothing. Do you mean that physics has explained how particles can emerge from so-called empty space, or are you making a deeper claim?

Krauss: I'm making a deeper claim, but at the same time I think you're overstating what I argued. I don't think I argued that physics has definitively shown how something could come from nothing; physics has shown how plausible physical mechanisms might cause this to happen. I try to be intellectually honest in everything that I write, especially about what we know and what we don't know. If you're writing for the public, the one thing you can't do is overstate your claim, because people are going to believe you. They see I'm a physicist and so if I say that protons are little pink elephants, people might believe me. And so I try to be very careful and responsible. We don't know how something can come from nothing, but we do know some plausible ways that it might."

Han er ikke overbegeistret for religiøse heller. Krauss tror til og med at det filosofiske spørsmålet om hvordan det kan ha seg det er noe fremfor ikke noe er ... religiøst.

"The religious question "why is there something rather than nothing," has been around since people have been around, and now we're actually reaching a point where science is beginning to address that question. And so I figured I could use that question as a way to celebrate the revolutionary changes that we've achieved in refining our picture of the universe. I didn't write the book to attack religion, per se. The purpose of the book is to point out all of these amazing things that we now know about the universe. Reading some of the reactions to the book, it seems like you automatically become strident the minute you try to explain something naturally."

Å se etter en naturlig forklaring på hvordan null natur kan bli til natur synes likevel ikke helt naturlig.

Det er nok derfor han ikke starter med null natur. Hvordan noe fysisk kan omdannes til noe annet fysisk er enklere å forklare enn hvordan ikke noe kan omdannes til noe.