Dennis Overbye explores "why is there something, rather than nothing?"
It seems the wackiest people out there on the intellectual fringe are the cosmologists and the physicists. They have some strange, weird, and seemingly irrational ideas about the Universe, and how it came about, and where it's going, and what it's composed of, etc.
And we don't need no stinking God-invention to explain things and to make us feel important or give the thing some kind of "meaning." That I'm afraid is all up to us.
If you read the article you will be rewarded with trains of thought like this:
"Why, for example, should we assume that
nothingness is more natural than somethingness? Indeed, you might ask
why it is that we think there is something here at all. The total energy
of the universe might actually be zero, according to the strange
bookkeeping of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as Dr. Krauss
points out. “The universe,” Alan H. Guth,
a physicist at M.I.T., likes to say, “might be the ultimate free
lunch.” Even space and time themselves might be a kind of holographic
illusion, string theorists say. You might think to dispute this by kicking a rock, but remember that
both the rock and your foot are mostly empty space, prevented from
intermingling by electric fields."
And this:
“Maybe in the true eternal multiverse there are truly no laws,” Dr.
Krauss said in an e-mail. “Maybe indeed randomness is all there is and
everything that can happen happens somewhere.”
And finally this:
"If nothing is our past, it could also be our future. As the universe,
driven by dark energy — that is to say, the negative pressure of nothing
— expands faster and faster, the galaxies will become invisible, and
all the energy and information will be sucked out of the cosmos. The
universe will revert to nothingness. Nothing to nothing. One day it’s all going to seem like a dream. But who is or was the dreamer?"
