Lawrence Krauss Gets Smacked
If you think nothing can create something, you have another thing coming.
Lawrence Krauss, to put it bluntly, is a dolt.
In this article, philosopher David Albert, who is professor of philosophy at at Columbia, slaps Krauss’s hands for being a bad, bad boy. He essentially condemns Krauss’s thesis in his new book A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.
Excerpt:
Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right.
I’ve posted a couple times about Krauss and his new book about ”nothing.” I wonder if anyone can get through to this fool. Krauss, to put it bluntly, is a dolt. He needs to keep doing what he’s good at–namely, science, and please step away from philosophy and theology, because he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.
One of my favorite bloggers and philosophers made an excellent post that rips the covers off of Krauss’s nonsense. You can find his article here. He does a much better job of exposing Krauss as one who spouts “sophistry for the purpose of exploiting rubes to make a quick pop science buck.”
Krauss, can you make up your mind?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAnrYnMxIGo
Please, Krauss, make up your mind about nothing. I’ve never seen this much of a blatant use of equivocation. Not only that, but Krauss had the nerve to say that the questions of “what is nothing?” and “what is something?” is not philosophical, but scientific. Really? Nevermind that this presupposes a philosophical stance. But like those amazing infomercials say, wait, it gets better!
So first Krauss says that quantum mechanics has allowed us to see that something can come from nothing. Later, Krauss tells us that science has revealed that empty space is not empty at all, but is instead particles. He also notes that empty space can contain energy.
So far we have learned that nothing, and empty space, is really a) particles and b) energy.
So, given that “nothing” is particles and energy, one can say that the universe did come from nothing! But, as you’ve already noticed, Krauss equivocates BIG TIME with our little tricky friend called nothing. Nothing, then, is not really nothing but really something: particles and energy. His whole point is to show that something can come from nothing, uncaused without the aid of God. But all he’s really done is shown that the universe came from something (particles and energy), thus demonstrating the truth of the very thing he is trying to disprove, i.e., something cannot arise from nothing uncaused. The problem is still there, it’s just pushed back a step. Where did the particles and energy come from if it all arose from the big bang?
Well done, Krauss.
