The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far

"Krauss possesses a rare talent for making the hardest ideas in astrophysics accessible to the layman, due in part to his sly humor... Krauss is genuinely in awe of the "wondrously strange" nature of our physical world, and his enthusiasm is infectious.”

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Lawrence M. Krauss

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From award-winning physicist, public intellectual, and the bestselling author of A Universe from Nothing Lawrence Krauss, comes “a masterful blend of history, modern physics, and cosmic perspective that empowers the reader to not only embrace our understanding of the universe, but also revel in what remains to be discovered” (Neil deGrasse Tyson, American Museum of Natural History).

In this grand poetic vision of the universe, Lawrence Krauss tells the dramatic story of the discovery of the hidden world that underlies reality—and our place within it.

Reality is not what you think or sense—it’s weird, wild, and counterintuitive, and its inner workings seem at least as implausible as the idea that something can come from nothing.

With his trademark wit and accessible style, Krauss leads us to realms so small that they are invisible to microscopes, to the birth and rebirth of light, and into the natural forces that govern our existence. His unique blend of rigorous research and engaging storytelling invites us into the lives and minds of remarkable scientists who have helped unravel the unexpected fabric of reality with reasoning rather than superstition and dogma, and to explain how everything we see—and can’t see—came about. A passionate advocate for reason, Krauss gives the rationale for the seemingly irrational—and the mysteries and apparent contradictions of quantum physics, and explores what that means for our lives here on Earth—and beyond.

At its core, The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far is about the best of what it means to be human—an epic history of our ultimately purposeless universe that addresses the question, “Why are we here?”

Leseprobe
The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far

Chapter 1

FROM THE ARMOIRE TO THE CAVE

The simple inherit folly, but the prudent are crowned with knowledge.

—PROVERBS 14:18

In my beginning there was light.

Surely there was light at the beginning of time, but before we can get to the beginning of time, we will need to explore our own beginnings, which also means exploring the beginning of science. And that means returning to the ultimate motive for both science and religion: the longing for something else. Something beyond the universe of our experience.

For many people, that longing translates into something that gives meaning and purpose to the universe and extends to a longing for some hidden place that is better than the world in which we live, where sins are forgiven, pain is absent, and death does not exist. Others, however, long for a hidden place of a very different sort, the physical world beyond our senses, the world that helps us understand how things behave the way they do, rather than why. This hidden world underlies what we experience, and the understanding of it gives us the power to change our lives, our environment, and our future.

The contrast between these two worlds is reflected in two very different works of literature.

The first, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis, is a twentieth-century children’s fantasy with decidedly religious overtones. It captures a childhood experience most of us have had—looking under the bed or in the closet or in the attic for hidden treasure or evidence that there is more out there than what we normally experience. In the book, several schoolchildren discover a strange new world, Narnia, by climbing into a large wardrobe in the country house outside London where they have been sequestered for their protection during the Second World War. The children help save Narnia with the aid of a lion, who lets himself be humiliated and sacrificed, Christlike, at an altar in order to conquer evil in his world.

While the religious allusion in Lewis’s story is clear, we can also interpret it in another way—as an allegory, not for the existence of God or the devil, but rather for the remarkable and potentially terrifying possibilities of the unknown, possibilities that lie just beyond the edge of our senses, just waiting for us to be brave enough to seek them out. Possibilities that, once revealed, may enrich our understanding of ourselves or, for some who feel a need, provide a sense of value and purpose.

The portal to a hidden world inside the wardrobe is at once safe, with the familiar smell of oft-worn clothes, and mysterious. It implies the need to move beyond classical notions of space and time. For if nothing is revealed to an observer who is in front of or behind the wardrobe, and something is revealed only to someone inside, then the space experienced inside the wardrobe must be far larger than that seen from its outside.

Such a concept is characteristic of a universe in which space and time can be dynamical, as in the General Theory of Relativity, where, for example, from outside the “event horizon” of a black hole—that radius inside of which there is no escape—a black hole might appear to comprise a small volume, but for an observer inside (who has not yet been crushed to smithereens by the gravitational forces present), the volume can look quite different. Indeed, it is possible, though beyond the domain where we can perform reliable calculations, that the space inside a black hole might provide a portal to another universe disconnected from our own.

But the central point I want to return to is that the possibility of universes beyond our perception seems to be tied, in the literary and philosophical imagination, at least, to the possibility that space itself is not what it seems.

The harbinger of this notion, the “ur” story if you will, was written twenty-three centuries before Lewis penned his fantasy. I refer to Plato’s Republic, and in particular to my favorite section, the Allegory of the Cave. But in spite of its early provenance, it illuminates more directly and more clearly both the potential necessity and the potential perils of searching for understanding beyond the reach of our immediate senses.

In the allegory, Plato likens our experience of reality to that of a group of individuals who live their entire lives imprisoned inside a cave, forced to face a blank wall. Their only view of the real world is that wall, which is illuminated by a fire behind them, and on which they see shadows moving. The shadows come from objects located behind them that the light of the fire projects on the wall.

I show the drawing below, which came from the high school text in which I first read this allegory, in a 1961 translation of Plato’s dialogues.

The drawing is amusing because it clearly reflects as much about the time it was drawn as it does the configuration of the cave described in the dialogue. Why, for example, are the prisoners here all women, and scantily clad ones at that? In Plato’s day, any sexual allusion might easily have displayed young boys.

Plato argues that the prisoners will view the shadows as reality and even give them names. This is not unreasonable, and it is, in one sense, as we shall soon see, a very modern view of what reality is, namely that which we can directly measure. My favorite definition of reality still is that given by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” For the prisoners, the shadows are what they see. They are also likely to hear only the echoes of n…