Lawrence M. Krauss - The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far

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Praise for The Greatest Story Ever ToldSo Far

In every debate Ive done with theologians and religious believers, their knock-out final argument always comes in the form of two questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? and Why are we here? The presumption is that if science provides no answers then there must be a God. But God or no, we still want answers. In A Universe from Nothing Lawrence Krauss, one of the biggest thinkers of our time, addressed the first question with verve, and in The Greatest Story Ever Told he tackles the second with elegance. Both volumes should be placed in hotel rooms across America, in the drawer next to the Gideon Bible.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, columnist for Scientific American , and author of The Moral Arc

A Homeric tale of science, history, and philosophy revealing how we learned so much about the universe and its tiniest parts.

Sheldon Glashow, Nobel laureate in physics

Discovering the bedrock nature of physical reality ranks as one of humanitys greatest collective achievements. This book gives a fine account of the main ideas and how they emerged. Krauss is himself close to the field and can offer insights into the personalities who have led the key advances. A practiced and skilled writer, he succeeds in making the physics as simple as possible but no simpler. I dont know a better book on this subject.

Martin Rees, author of Just Six Numbers

It is an exhilarating experience to be led through this fascinating story, from Galileo to the Standard Model and the Higgs boson and beyond, with lucid detail and insight, illuminating vividly not only the achievements themselves but also the joy of creative thought and discovery, enriched with vignettes of the remarkable individuals who paved the way. It amply demonstrates that the discovery that nature really follows the simple and elegant rules intuited by the twentieth- and twenty-first-century versions of Platos philosophers is one of the most astonishing achievements of the human intellect.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (emeritus), MIT

Charming... Krauss has written an account with sweep and verve that shows the full development of our ideas about the makeup of the world around us.... A great romp.

Walter Gilbert, Nobel laureate in chemistry

I loved the fight scenes and the sex scenes were excellent.

Eric Idle

ALSO BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS

A Universe from Nothing

The Fifth Essence

Fear of Physics

The Physics of Star Trek

Beyond Star Trek

Hiding in the Mirror

Quintessence

Atom

Quantum Man

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Copyright 2017 by Lawrence Krauss

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First Atria Books hardcover edition March 2017

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Interior design by Dana Sloan

Jacket design by Na Y Kim

Jacket image Igor Chekalin/Moment/Getty Images (Messier 78)

Author photograph by Jena Sprau

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-7761-0

ISBN 978-1-4767-7763-4 (ebook)

For Nancy

These are the tears of things,

and the stuff of our mortality

cuts us to the heart.

VIRGIL

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.

J. A. BAKER, THE PEREGRINE

I n the beginning there was light.

But more than this, there was gravity.

After that, all hell broke loose....

This is how the story of the greatest intellectual adventure in history might properly be introduced. It is a story of sciences quest to uncover the hidden realities underlying the world of our experience, which required marshaling the very pinnacle of human creativity and intellectual bravery on an unparalleled global scale. This process would not have been possible without a willingness to dispense with all kinds of beliefs and preconceptions and dogma, scientific and otherwise. The story is filled with drama and surprise. It spans the full arc of human history, and most remarkably, the current version isnt even the final onejust another working draft.

Its a story that deserves to be shared far more broadly. Already in the first world, parts of this story are helping to slowly replace the myths and superstitions that more ignorant societies found solace in centuries or millennia ago. Nevertheless, thanks to the directors George Stevens and David Lean, the Judeo-Christian Bible is still sometimes referred to as the greatest story ever told. This characterization is astounding because, even allowing for the frequent sex and violence, and a bit of poetry in the Psalms, the Bible as a piece of literature arguably does not compare well to the equally racy but less violent Greek and Roman epics such as the Aeneid or the Odyssey even if the English translation of the Bible has served as a model for many subsequent books. Either way, as a guide for understanding the world, the Bible is pathetically inconsistent and outdated. And one might legitimately argue that as a guide for human behavior large swaths of it border on the obscene.

In science, the very word sacred is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. For this reason the pinnacle of the human story did not conclude with a prophets sacrifice two thousand years ago, any more than it did with the death of another prophet six hundred years later. The story of our origins and our future is a tale that keeps on telling. And the story is getting more interesting all the time, not due to revelation, but due to the steady march of scientific discovery.

Contrary to many popular perceptions, this scientific story also encompasses both poetry and a deep spirituality. But this spirituality has the additional virtue of being tied to the real worldand not created in large part to appease our hopes and dreams.