Victor J. Stenger - God and the Multiverse: Humanitys Expanding View of the Cosmos

Victor J. Stenger is a retired elementary particle physicist and the author of twelve previous books, including the 2007 New York Times bestseller God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.

Dr. Stenger grew up in a Catholic working-class neighborhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant; his mother, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. He attended public schools and received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. While at NCE, he was editor of the student newspaper and received several journalism awards.

Moving to Los Angeles on a Hughes Aircraft Company fellowship, Dr. Stenger received a master of science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959 and a doctorate in physics in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii and retired to Colorado in 2000. His current positions include emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany and Oxford University in England, and he has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England; the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy; and the University of Florence in Italy.

His research career spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, charmed quarks, gluons, and neutrinos. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of the project, Masatoshi Koshiba, shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for Physics for that work.

Victor J. Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of critically well-received popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience.

Vic and his wife, Phylliss, have been happily married since 1962 and have two children and four grandchildren.

Dr. Stenger maintains a website where much of his writing can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/.

VICTOR J. STENGER is the author of the New York Times bestseller God: The Failed Hypothesis, God and the Atom, God and the Folly of Faith, The Comprehensible Cosmos, and many other popular science books. He is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii.

Author photo Studio M

The author is indebted to many who have provided feedback on this manuscript. In particular, I must single out Bob Zannelli, Don McGee, and Brent Meeker for their meticulous multiple readings and their many critical corrections and recommended rewordings. They and other members of the Google discussion group atvoid (Atoms and the Void) have been a continual help to me with my previous books and the numerous essays and blogs I generate. This group includes Greg Bart, Lawrence Crowell, Anne OReilly, Kerr Regier, Christopher Savage, Brian Stilson, Pete Stewart, Phil Thrift, Jim Wyman, and Roahn Wynar. I am also grateful for comments from author Kim Clark, physicist Taner Edis, and mathematician James Lindsay.

Thanks also go to several professional astronomers, physicists, and cosmologists who have provided invaluable comments. I am especially grateful to astronomer Jay Pasachoff for his meticulous reading of the manuscript and for providing many corrections. Suggested changes to specific portions of the manuscript where they had deep expertise were also made by Sean Carroll, Alan Guth, Lawrence Krauss, Andrei Linde, Robert Nemiroff, Brent Tully, and Alex Vilenkin.

Finally, I have once again benefitted greatly from the support of my work given by Jonathan Kurtz, Steven L. Mitchell, and their dedicated, talented staff at Prometheus Books.

Abdo, Aous A., et al. Measurement of the Cosmic Ray e+e- Spectrum from 20 GeV to 1 TeV with the Fermi Large Area Telescope. Physical Review Letters 102, no. 18 (2009): 181101.

Ade, P. A. R., et al. Planck 2013 Results. XVI. Cosmological Parameters. arXiv: 1303.5076. 2013. To be published.

Ade, P. A. R., et al. Detection of B-Mode Polarization at Degree Angular Scales by BICEP2, Physical Review Letters 112, no. 24 (2014): 241101.

Adriani, Oscar, et al. An Anomalous Positron Abundance in Cosmic Rays with Energies 1.5100 GeV. Nature 458, no. 7238 (2009): 607609.

Aguilar, M., et al. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the International Space Station: Part IResults from the Test Flight on the Space Shuttle. Physics Reports 366, no. 6 (2002): 331405.

Aguilar, M., et al. First Result from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station: Precision Measurement of the Positron Fraction in Primary Cosmic Rays Of 0.5350 GeV. Physical Review Letters 110, no. 14 (2013): 141102.

Aguirre, Anthony, and Max Tegmark. Born in an Infinite Universe: A Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Physical Review D 84, no. 10 (2011): 105002.

Aguirre, Anthony, and Steven Gratton. Inflation without a Beginning: A Null Boundary Proposal. Physical Review D67 (2003): 083515.

. Steady-State Eternal Inflation. Physical Review D 65, no. 8 (2002): 083507.

Aharonian, F. A., A. N. Timokhin, and A. V. Plyasheshnikov. On the Origin of Highest Energy Gamma-Rays from Mkn 501. Astronomy and Astrophysics 384, no. 3 (2002): 83447.

Akerib, D. S., et al. First Results from the LUX Dark Matter Experiment at the Stanford Underground Research Facility. Physical Review Letters 112 (2014): 091303.

Alexander, Amir R. Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014.

Al-Khalili, Jim. The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance. New York: Penguin, 2011.

Albert, David. On the Origin of Everything. New York Times, March 25, 2012.

Albrecht, Andreas and Paul J. Steinhardt. Cosmology for Grand Unified Theories with Radiatively Induced Symmetry Breaking. Physical Review Letters 48, no. 17 (1982): 122023.

Alleyne, Richard. God Is Not the Creator, Claims Academic. Telegraph (U.K.), October 8, 2009.

Alpher, Ralph, and Robert Herman. Genesis of the Big Bang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

. Remarks on the Evolution of the Expanding Universe. Physical Review 75 (1949): 108995.

Alpher, Ralph A., Hans Bethe, and George Gamow. The Origin of the Chemical Elements.