Whether framed philosophically as “Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?” or more colloquially as “But, Mommy, who made God?” the metaphysical mystery about how we came into existence remains the most fractious and fascinating question of all time. Following in the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose, and even Stephen Hawking, Jim Holt emerges with an engrossing narrative that traces our latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe.
As he takes on the role of cosmological detective, the brilliant yet slyly humorous Holt contends that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God vs. the Big Bang. Whether interviewing a cranky Oxford philosopher, a Physics Nobel Laureate, or a French Buddhist monk, Holt pursues unexplored and often bizarre angles to this cosmic puzzle. The result is a brilliant synthesis of cosmology, mathematics, and physics—one that propels his own work to the level of philosophy itself.
About Jim Holt
Jim Holt, a prominent essayist and critic on philosophy, mathematics, and science, is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.
Editorial Review
Any book with such a title is bound to raise at least as many questions as it tries to answer. “I cannot help feeling astonished that I exist,” writes Holt, “that the universe has come to produce these very thoughts now bubbling up in my stream of consciousness.” With too much abstract theory, the author runs the risk of the narrative collapsing under its own weight. However, if he moves too far in the other direction, rigorous exploration gives way to platitudes. Holt finds the right recipe, combining a wide variety of subjects in his exploration of his “improbable existence.” The author lists his background as an “essayist and critic on philosophy, math, and science,” which could serve as the boiled-down review of this book, as he draws from those three disciplines and others and respectfully does not shy away from posing thoughtful, difficult questions to his interview subjects. Through discussions with philosophers of religion and science, humanists, biologists, string theorists, as well as research into the scholarship of days past—from Heidegger, Parmenides, Pythagoras and others—and an interview with John Updike, Holt provides a master’s-level course on the theories and their detractors. The interludes find the author positioning himself as an existential gumshoe, but also working through the sudden loss of a pet and, later, the death of his mother. – Kirkus Reviews
Review: Jim Holt’s compelling ‘Why Does the World Exist?’
The Chicago Tribune Book Review – July 8, 2012 (Excerpt)
“How old is the Universe?” Kurt Vonnegut asked in his 1973 novel “Breakfast of Champions.” “It is one half-second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here.”
For all its breeziness, that still seems to me a pretty good cosmology, one that expresses the essential intractability of everything. And yet, if Jim Holt’s deft and consuming “Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story” has anything to tell us, it’s that such a comment is less about literary riffing than deep philosophy.
Holt describes a French TV show in which a priest, a physicist and a Buddhist monk discuss a “metaphysical question, one that was originally posed three centuries ago by Leibniz: … Why is there something rather than nothing?” The priest invokes God, the physicist quantum mechanics, but it is the monk who frames the conversation most vividly. “As a Buddhist, he says, he believes that the universe had no beginning. … Nothingness … could never give way to being, he says, because it is defined in opposition to that which exists. A billion causes could not make a universe come into existence out of what does not exist. That is why, the monk says, the Buddhist doctrine of a beginning-less universe makes the most metaphysical sense.” [Read the full article...]
Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt – Reviewed by Troy Jollimore
Barnes & Noble Review – July 25, 2012 (Excerpt)
“It has been said,” Jim Holt writes in his new book, “that the question Why is there something rather than nothing? is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child.” I might have reversed the adjectives, but the basic thought that lies behind this — that the child’s imagination is, at its core, philosophical and metaphysical, and that the philosopher is the adult who has managed to retain his childhood sense of wonder at the universe — seems to me sound.
And as for this particular question: well, it’s a biggie. Why is there stuff — indeed, quite a lot of stuff, as anyone who has walked down Fifth Avenue, visited the Grand Canyon, or simply looked at the night sky, can attest — rather than a whole lot of nothing? (Or would that be a tiny bit of nothing?) Not every question gets, or deserves, its own book, but the question that gives Why Does the World Exist? its title is far too big for any one volume. Holt’s book is not meant to be the last word on the matter; it is best seen as an entertaining introduction to a vast range of argument and speculation that would take more lifetimes to master than any of us has at his disposal.
The arguments can get complex but return repeatedly to rest on a couple of basic issues. Here is a question to start with: What, if anything, are we allowed to take for granted when we describe the beginning of the universe? The obvious rejoinder to any proposal that “X caused (or is a reason for) the universe, so the existence of the universe is explained by X” is to say, “Alright, but where did X come from?” (Or, if X is a law or principle, why does X obtain? What makes it true?) This rejoinder is extremely effective when X is, say, God: as Richard Dawkins, among many others, has pointed out, the religious “explanation” of the universe — God made it! — is entirely unsatisfying unless one can also explain who made God. One can hold that God does not need an explanation, of course; but then, why not just say that about the universe itself? As one would expect, there have been attempts to show that God, by his nature, is special and does not need any such explanation; the attempts offered thus far, though, are hopelessly unsatisfying for any questioner not already committed to a religious framework for thought. [Read the full article...]
Into the Nothing, After Something
The New York Times Book Review – August 2, 2012 (Excerpt)
A subterranean stream of death and personal tragedy trickles around the margins of Jim Holt’s new book, “Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story.”
This volume was given a blurb by Christopher Hitchens a few days before he died. Among Mr. Holt’s central interview subjects is John Updike, who would be gone within a year. Mr. Updike, as verbally charismatic as ever, compares one notion of reality to “a piece of light verse.”
Mr. Holt’s mother dies during the course of this book’s narrative. His younger brother died a few years earlier, Mr. Holt tells us, “at a party after taking too much cocaine.” The author’s beloved dog becomes suddenly ill, and Mr. Holt sits and holds it for 10 days. It too expires.
Mr. Holt doesn’t linger long over any of these events. But this intimacy with mortality lends heft and emotion to one of his penetrating book’s fundamental questions: whether the universe, like life, is anything more than a short interlude between two vast nothings.
Mr. Holt, who writes frequently about science and philosophy for The New Yorker and The New York Times, reports that he has a trick for maintaining his outward composure during unbearable moments. He mentally works through a “beautiful little theorem about prime numbers,” attributed to Fermat. He allows himself to break down only later. [Read the full article...]
The Basic Question -‘Why Does the World Exist?’ by Jim Holt
The New York Times Book Review – August 2, 2012 (Excerpt)
There could have been nothing. It might have been easier. Instead there is something. The universe exists, and we are here to ask about it. Why?
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” sounds so fundamental a question that it should have perplexed humanity since the dawn of philosophy. Strangely, it hasn’t, or at least it has left no trace on early written literature. Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and earlier Greek philosophers did wonder what the world was made of. Thales thought its primal substance was water, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus fire. But they didn’t ask why anything was there at all. We find no one haunted by the specter of non-being until Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote in 1714, “The first question which we have a right to ask will be, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ”
For some, the question is not really a question. It is more an expression of philosophical amazement — a way of saying “wow” in the face of existence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein described a feeling of awe that led him to use phrases like “How extraordinary that anything should exist,” but he decided it was better not to say such things. Martin Heidegger decided the other way, and made the Question of Being the foundation for his entire philosophy, becoming, as George Steiner described him, “the great master of astonishment, the man whose amazement before the blank fact that weare instead of not being, has put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious.”
Other people have treated it as a real question, the kind that might have an answer. And some think they have actually found answers, though these tend to be so different that one can hardly believe they started with the same question. [Read the full article...]
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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7
The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]
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