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Why does the universe exist? | Jim Holt - TED Talk
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Why does the universe exist?

00:15
Why is there — Okay. Okay. (Laughter)
00:18
This is a cosmic mystery. Be solemn.
00:21
Why is there a world, why are we in it,
00:25
and why is there something rather than nothing at all?
00:27
I mean, this is the super ultimate "why" question?
00:31
So I'm going to talk about the mystery of existence,
00:34
the puzzle of existence,
00:35
where we are now in addressing it,
00:38
and why you should care,
00:40
and I hope you do care.
00:42
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that
00:45
those who don't wonder about the contingency of their existence,
00:49
of the contingency of the world's existence,
00:52
are mentally deficient.
00:53
That's a little harsh, but still. (Laughter)
00:57
So this has been called the most sublime
00:59
and awesome mystery,
01:01
the deepest and most far-reaching question
01:04
man can pose.
01:05
It's obsessed great thinkers.
01:07
Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest
01:08
philosopher of the 20th century,
01:11
was astonished that there should be a world at all.
01:13
He wrote in his "Tractatus," Proposition 4.66,
01:17
"It is not how things are in the world
01:20
that is the mystical,
01:21
it's that the world exists."
01:24
And if you don't like taking your epigrams
01:26
from a philosopher, try a scientist.
01:29
John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great physicists
01:31
of the 20th century,
01:33
the teacher of Richard Feynman,
01:34
the coiner of the term "black hole,"
01:37
he said, "I want to know
01:40
how come the quantum,
01:41
how come the universe, how come existence?"
01:44
And my friend Martin Amis —
01:46
sorry that I'll be doing a lot of name-dropping in this talk,
01:49
so get used to it —
01:50
my dear friend Martin Amis once said
01:55
that we're about five Einsteins away from answering
01:59
the mystery of where the universe came from.
02:01
And I've no doubt there are five Einsteins
02:03
in the audience tonight.
02:05
Any Einsteins? Show of hands? No? No? No?
02:06
No Einsteins? Okay.
02:08
So this question, why is there something rather than nothing,
02:12
this sublime question, was posed rather late
02:14
in intellectual history.
02:16
It was towards the end of the 17th century,
02:19
the philosopher Leibniz who asked it,
02:21
a very smart guy, Leibniz,
02:23
who invented the calculus
02:25
independently of Isaac Newton, at about the same time,
02:28
but for Leibniz, who asked why is there something rather than nothing,
02:31
this was not a great mystery.
02:33
He either was or pretended to be
02:35
an Orthodox Christian in his metaphysical outlook,
02:38
and he said it's obvious why the world exists:
02:41
because God created it.
02:44
And God created, indeed, out of nothing at all.
02:47
That's how powerful God is.
02:48
He doesn't need any preexisting materials to fashion a world out of.
02:52
He can make it out of sheer nothingness,
02:54
creation ex nihilo.
02:56
And by the way, this is what
02:57
most Americans today believe.
03:00
There is no mystery of existence for them.
03:01
God made it.
03:03
So let's put this in an equation.
03:05
I don't have any slides so I'm going to mime my visuals,
03:08
so use your imaginations.
03:09
So it's God + nothing = the world.
03:15
Okay? Now that's the equation.
03:19
And so maybe you don't believe in God.
03:20
Maybe you're a scientific atheist
03:22
or an unscientific atheist, and you don't believe in God,
03:26
and you're not happy with it.
03:27
By the way, even if we have this equation,
03:30
God + nothing = the world,
03:32
there's already a problem:
03:33
Why does God exist?
03:36
God doesn't exist by logic alone
03:38
unless you believe the ontological argument,
03:40
and I hope you don't, because it's not a good argument.
03:43
So it's conceivable, if God were to exist,
03:46
he might wonder, I'm eternal, I'm all-powerful,
03:49
but where did I come from?
03:51
(Laughter)
03:54
Whence then am I?
03:55
God speaks in a more formal English.
03:58
(Laughter)
04:00
And so one theory is that God was so bored with
04:03
pondering the puzzle of His own existence
04:05
that He created the world just to distract himself.
04:08
But anyway, let's forget about God.
04:10
Take God out of the equation: We have
04:11
________ + nothing = the world.
04:14
Now, if you're a Buddhist,
04:16
you might want to stop right there,
04:18
because essentially what you've got is
04:20
nothing = the world,
04:22
and by symmetry of identity, that means
04:23
the world = nothing. Okay?
04:25
And to a Buddhist, the world is just a whole lot of nothing.
04:28
It's just a big cosmic vacuity.
04:31
And we think there's a lot of something out there
04:33
but that's because we're enslaved by our desires.
04:36
If we let our desires melt away,
04:39
we'll see the world for what it truly is,
04:42
a vacuity, nothingness,
04:44
and we'll slip into this happy state of nirvana
04:46
which has been defined as having
04:48
just enough life to enjoy being dead. (Laughter)
04:51
So that's the Buddhist thinking.
04:53
But I'm a Westerner, and I'm still concerned
04:56
with the puzzle of existence, so I've got
04:58
________ + —
05:00
this is going to get serious in a minute, so —
05:02
________ + nothing = the world.
05:05
What are we going to put in that blank?
05:06
Well, how about science?
05:08
Science is our best guide to the nature of reality,
05:12
and the most fundamental science is physics.
05:15
That tells us what naked reality really is,
05:18
that reveals what I call TAUFOTU,
05:20
the True And Ultimate Furniture Of The Universe.
05:23
So maybe physics can fill this blank,
05:26
and indeed, since about the late 1960s or around 1970,
05:31
physicists have purported to give
05:35
a purely scientific explanation of how
05:38
a universe like ours could have popped into existence
05:41
out of sheer nothingness,
05:43
a quantum fluctuation out of the void.
05:46
Stephen Hawking is one of these physicists,
05:48
more recently Alex Vilenkin,
05:50
and the whole thing has been popularized
05:52
by another very fine physicist and friend of mine,
05:54
Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called
05:57
"A Universe from Nothing,"
05:59
and Lawrence thinks that he's given —
06:01
he's a militant atheist, by the way,
06:03
so he's gotten God out of the picture.
06:05
The laws of quantum field theory,
06:07
the state-of-the-art physics, can show how
06:09
out of sheer nothingness,
06:10
no space, no time, no matter, nothing,
06:12
a little nugget of false vacuum
06:16
can fluctuate into existence,
06:18
and then, by the miracle of inflation,
06:20
blow up into this huge and variegated cosmos
06:23
we see around us.
06:25
Okay, this is a really ingenious scenario.
06:28
It's very speculative. It's fascinating.
06:31
But I've got a big problem with it,
06:33
and the problem is this:
06:35
It's a pseudo-religious point of view.
06:37
Now, Lawrence thinks he's an atheist,
06:39
but he's still in thrall to a religious worldview.
06:41
He sees physical laws as being like divine commands.
06:46
The laws of quantum field theory for him
06:48
are like fiat lux, "Let there be light."
06:51
The laws have some sort of ontological power or clout
06:55
that they can form the abyss,
06:57
that it's pregnant with being.
06:59
They can call a world into existence out of nothing.
07:02
But that's a very primitive view of what
07:04
a physical law is, right?
07:06
We know that physical laws are actually
07:09
generalized descriptions of patterns and regularities
07:12
in the world.
07:13
They don't exist outside the world.
07:15
They don't have any ontic cloud of their own.
07:17
They can't call a world into existence
07:19
out of nothingness.
07:21
That's a very primitive view
07:22
of what a scientific law is.
07:24
And if you don't believe me on this,
07:26
listen to Stephen Hawking,
07:28
who himself put forward a model of the cosmos
07:32
that was self-contained,
07:33
didn't require any outside cause, any creator,
07:37
and after proposing this,
07:39
Hawking admitted that he was still puzzled.
07:41
He said, this model is just equations.
07:44
What breathes fire into the equations
07:47
and creates a world for them to describe?
07:50
He was puzzled by this,
07:51
so equations themselves can't do the magic,
07:55
can't resolve the puzzle of existence.
07:57
And besides, even if the laws could do that,
08:00
why this set of laws?
08:02
Why quantum field theory that describes
08:05
a universe with a certain number of forces
08:06
and particles and so forth?
08:07
Why not a completely different set of laws?
08:10
There are many, many mathematically consistent sets of laws.
08:13
Why not no laws at all? Why not sheer nothingness?
08:16
So this is a problem, believe it or not,
08:18
that reflective physicists really think a lot about,
08:21
and at this point they tend to go metaphysical,
08:24
say, well, maybe the set of laws
08:26
that describes our universe,
08:28
it's just one set of laws
08:29
and it describes one part of reality,
08:31
but maybe every consistent set of laws
08:34
describes another part of reality,
08:36
and in fact all possible physical worlds
08:40
really exist, they're all out there.
08:42
We just see a little tiny part of reality
08:45
that's described by the laws of quantum field theory,
08:47
but there are many, many other worlds,
08:49
parts of reality that are described
08:51
by vastly different theories
08:53
that are different from ours in ways we can't imagine,
08:56
that are inconceivably exotic.
08:59
Steven Weinberg, the father
09:01
of the standard model of particle physics,
09:04
has actually flirted with this idea himself,
09:07
that all possible realities actually exist.
09:11
Also, a younger physicist, Max Tegmark,
09:14
who believes that all mathematical structures exist,
09:18
and mathematical existence is the same thing
09:20
as physical existence,
09:22
so we have this vastly rich multiverse
09:24
that encompasses every logical possibility.
09:28
Now, in taking this metaphysical way out,
09:31
these physicists and also philosophers are actually
09:34
reaching back to a very old idea
09:36
that goes back to Plato.
09:38
It's the principle of plenitude or fecundity,
09:41
or the great chain of being,
09:43
that reality is actually as full as possible.
09:47
It's as far removed from nothingness
09:48
as it could possibly be.
09:51
So we have these two extremes now.
09:54
We have sheer nothingness on one side,
09:57
and we have this vision of a reality
09:59
that encompasses every conceivable world
10:03
at the other extreme: the fullest possible reality,
10:05
nothingness, the simplest possible reality.
10:08
Now what's in between these two extremes?
10:11
There are all kinds of intermediate realities
10:13
that include some things and leave out others.
10:16
So one of these intermediate realities
10:18
is, say, the most mathematically elegant reality,
10:23
that leaves out the inelegant bits,
10:25
the ugly asymmetries and so forth.
10:28
Now, there are some physicists who will tell you
10:30
that we're actually living in the most elegant reality.
10:34
I think that Brian Greene is in the audience,
10:37
and he has written a book called "The Elegant Universe."
10:40
He claims that the universe we live in mathematically
10:43
is very elegant.
10:44
Don't believe him. (Laughter)
10:46
It's a pious hope, I wish it were true,
10:49
but I think the other day he admitted to me
10:51
it's really an ugly universe.
10:54
It's stupidly constructed,
10:55
it's got way too many arbitrary coupling constants
10:59
and mass ratios
11:00
and superfluous families of elementary particles,
11:03
and what the hell is dark energy?
11:05
It's a stick and bubble gum contraption.
11:09
It's not an elegant universe. (Laughter)
11:13
And then there's the best of all possible worlds
11:15
in an ethical sense.
11:17
You should get solemn now,
11:18
because a world in which sentient beings
11:21
don't suffer needlessly,
11:23
in which there aren't things like
11:25
childhood cancer or the Holocaust.
11:27
This is an ethical conception.
11:28
Anyway, so between nothingness
11:30
and the fullest possible reality,
11:32
various special realities.
11:34
Nothingness is special. It's the simplest.
11:36
Then there's the most elegant possible reality.
11:39
That's special.
11:41
The fullest possible reality, that's special.
11:43
But what are we leaving out here?
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There's also just the crummy,
11:48
generic realities
11:49
that aren't special in any way,
11:52
that are sort of random.
11:54
They're infinitely removed from nothingness,
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but they fall infinitely short of complete fullness.
12:00
They're a mixture of chaos and order,
12:03
of mathematical elegance and ugliness.
12:07
So I would describe these realities
12:09
as an infinite, mediocre, incomplete mess,
12:13
a generic reality, a kind of cosmic junk shot.
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And these realities,
12:18
is there a deity in any of these realities?
12:21
Maybe, but the deity isn't perfect
12:23
like the Judeo-Christian deity.
12:25
The deity isn't all-good and all-powerful.
12:29
It might be instead 100 percent malevolent
12:32
but only 80 percent effective,
12:34
which pretty much describes the world we see around us, I think. (Laughter)
12:40
So I would like to propose that the resolution
12:43
to the mystery of existence
12:45
is that the reality we exist in
12:49
is one of these generic realities.
12:51
Reality has to turn out some way.
12:54
It can either turn out to be nothing
12:56
or everything or something in between.
12:59
So if it has some special feature,
13:03
like being really elegant or really full
13:05
or really simple, like nothingness,
13:07
that would require an explanation.
13:09
But if it's just one of these random, generic realities,
13:12
there's no further explanation for it.
13:14
And indeed, I would say
13:15
that's the reality we live in.
13:17
That's what science is telling us.
13:20
At the beginning of the week,
13:21
we got the exciting information that
13:24
the theory of inflation, which predicts a big,
13:27
infinite, messy, arbitrary, pointless reality,
13:31
it's like a big frothing champagne
13:35
coming out of a bottle endlessly,
13:38
a vast universe, mostly a wasteland
13:40
with little pockets of charm and order and peace,
13:44
this has been confirmed,
13:46
this inflationary scenario, by the observations
13:49
made by radio telescopes in Antarctica
13:51
that looked at the signature of the gravitational waves
13:54
from just before the Big Bang.
13:56
I'm sure you all know about this.
13:58
So anyway, I think there's some evidence
14:01
that this really is the reality that we're stuck with.
14:04
Now, why should you care?
14:07
Well — (Laughter) —
14:09
the question, "Why does the world exist?"
14:12
that's the cosmic question, it sort of rhymes
14:14
with a more intimate question:
14:15
Why do I exist? Why do you exist?
14:18
you know, our existence would seem to be amazingly improbable,
14:22
because there's an enormous number of genetically possible humans,
14:26
if you can compute it by looking at
14:28
the number of the genes and the number of alleles and so forth,
14:30
and a back-of-the-envelope calculation will tell you
14:32
there are about 10 to the 10,000th
14:34
possible humans, genetically.
14:36
That's between a googol and a googolplex.
14:40
And the number of the actual humans that have existed
14:41
is 100 billion, maybe 50 billion,
14:44
an infinitesimal fraction, so all of us,
14:46
we've won this amazing cosmic lottery.
14:48
We're here. Okay.
14:50
So what kind of reality do we want to live in?
14:53
Do we want to live in a special reality?
14:55
What if we were living in the most elegant possible reality?
14:59
Imagine the existential pressure on us
15:02
to live up to that, to be elegant,
15:03
not to pull down the tone of it.
15:05
Or, what if we were living in the fullest possible reality?
15:08
Well then our existence would be guaranteed,
15:10
because every possible thing
15:12
exists in that reality,
15:14
but our choices would be meaningless.
15:16
If I really struggle morally and agonize
15:19
and I decide to do the right thing,
15:21
what difference does it make,
15:22
because there are an infinite number
15:24
of versions of me
15:25
also doing the right thing
15:26
and an infinite number doing the wrong thing.
15:28
So my choices are meaningless.
15:30
So we don't want to live in that special reality.
15:32
And as for the special reality of nothingness,
15:35
we wouldn't be having this conversation.
15:37
So I think living in a generic reality that's mediocre,
15:44
there are nasty bits and nice bits
15:46
and we could make the nice bits bigger
15:47
and the nasty bits smaller
15:50
and that gives us a kind of purpose in life.
15:53
The universe is absurd,
15:54
but we can still construct a purpose,
15:56
and that's a pretty good one,
15:57
and the overall mediocrity of reality
15:59
kind of resonates nicely with the mediocrity
16:02
we all feel in the core of our being.
16:04
And I know you feel it.
16:06
I know you're all special,
16:07
but you're still kind of secretly mediocre,
16:09
don't you think?
16:11
(Laughter) (Applause)
16:13
So anyway, you may say, this puzzle, the mystery of existence,
16:17
it's just silly mystery-mongering.
16:18
You're not astonished at the existence of the universe
16:22
and you're in good company.
16:24
Bertrand Russell said,
16:26
"I should say the universe is just there, and that's all."
16:30
Just a brute fact.
16:31
And my professor at Columbia, Sidney Morgenbesser,
16:34
a great philosophical wag,
16:35
when I said to him, "Professor Morgenbesser,
16:37
why is there something rather than nothing?"
16:40
And he said, "Oh, even if there was nothing,
16:42
you still wouldn't be satisfied."
16:44
So — (Laughter) — okay.
16:47
So you're not astonished. I don't care.
16:50
But I will tell you something to conclude
16:53
that I guarantee you will astonish you,
16:55
because it's astonished all of the brilliant,
16:58
wonderful people I've met at this TED conference,
17:00
when I've told them, and it's this:
17:02
Never in my life have I had a cell phone.
17:07
Thank you.
17:09
(Laughter) (Applause)