Review by New York Times Review
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 to say where you were. You could only describe your position in relationship to something else - which could only describe its position in relationship to you. In Einstein's cockeyed scheme you couldn't even say with authority what time it was. Again, your time was relative to their time and their time was relative to yours. This was from his Special Theory of Relativity. The sequel, General Relativity, was even weirder. Gravity is the curvature of some four-dimensional mind stuff called space-time, it was a trick of the Elders of Zion, some philosophical disease. "Scientific Dadalsm," a prominent German scientist called it. This wasn't just a fringe view. Philipp Lenard, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on cathode rays, wrote a fourvolume treatise on the one true science and called it "German Physics." In the foreword he touched on "Japanese Physics," "Arabian Physics" and "Negro Physics." But he saved his wrath for the physics of the Jews. "The Jew wants to create contradictions everywhere and to separate relations, so that preferably, the poor naïve German can no longer make any sense of it whatsoever." Einstein's theories, he wrote, "never were even intended to be true." Lenard just didn't understand them. "Jewish' physics." With Einstein's theories now at the bedrock of modern science, the Nazi's words have been justly forgotten. It seems almost perverse that Steven Gimbel, the chairman of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College, would want to bring back the old epithet and give it another spin. In his original new book, "Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion," he considers the possibility that the Nazis were on to something. If you can look past the anti-Semitism, he proposes, "maybe relativity is 'Jewish science' after all." What he means is that there might have been elements of Jewish thinking that gave rise to what is now recognized as one of the deepest insights of all time. BY casting Einstein as a philosophical anarchist, the Nazis missed the heart of his idea. Length contracts and time slows as an object speeds through space. But they have to in order to preserve what is truly absolute: the speed of light. Suppose Martians are watching us. Because light travels at a fixed velocity, what they are seeing from their perspective took place here about four minutes ago. If they could outrun the light beams bringing them the news, they could arrive before an event occurred - prevent the invasion of Poland, the attack on Pearl Harbor or the dropping of the atomic bomb. The theory Einstein discovered ensures that the world isn't even crazier than it is. Einstein, Gimbel argues, was especially well put to come upon such insights because he was a Jew. Gimbel is not saying that Einstein was deeply religious. When he talked about "the secrets of the Old One" or God playing dice, he was being a little ironic, using the idea of a deity he didn't believe in as a metaphor for the laws of the universe. Nor does Gimbel find any particularly Jewish ideas in Einstein's science or signs that, as the Nazis contended, it was politically motivated. I don't think many will need convincing on those points. But Gimbel is an engaging writer. In demonstrating the obvious, he takes readers on enlightening excursions through the nature of Judaism, Hegelian philosophy, wherever his curiosity leads. He dismisses Lenard's argument that there was something characteristically Jewish about the way Einstein put together his theory. Instead of trekking through nature like a robust German scout, with magnifying glass and telescope in his rucksack, he sat alone in his room scribbling numbers like a shut-in. For an oldschool physicist like Lenard, that wasn't how science is done. Experiment and observation come first, providing the data that the theorists then seek to explain. In fact, Lenard was falling behind the time. As the 20th century progressed, theory was often driving experiment -predicting from the logic of the equations phenomena for the experimenters to confirm. But there was nothing particularly Jewish about that. It was more Herr Professor Heisenberg's style than Einstein's. Einstein's own ideas sprang from his intuitions about nature - insights that came from thought experiments. They were imaginary but in principle they could be done: trains flashing signals back and forth, an elevator hurtling down a shaft or floating through space. What gives Einstein's work a Jewish flavor, Gimbel believes, is an approach to the universe that reminds him of the way a Talmudic scholar seeks to understand God's truth. It comes only in glimpses. "Thou shalt not steal" may seem clear enough. But is it stealing to keep a $100 bill you find on the ground? It depends. Did you see the person who might have dropped it? Was it found on a busy street or in a friend's backyard? In a hotel lobby with a lost and found? Without the luxury of a God's-eye view, we must reckon from different vantage points. "The heart of the Talmudic view is that there is an absolute truth, but this truth is not directly and completely available to us," Gimbel writes. "It turns out that exactly the same style of thinking occurs in the relativity theory and in some of Einstein's other research." From our blinkered perspective we see qualities called space and time. But in relativity theory, the two can be combined mathematically into something more fundamental: a four-dimensional abstraction called the space-time interval. Time and space vary according to the motion of the observer. But from any vantage point, an object's space-time interval would be the same - the higher truth that can be approached only from different angles. The same kind of thinking, Gimbel says, also led to Einstein's thought experiments with the elevator showing that when we feel the pull of gravity from the Earth or the push of acceleration from the takeoff of a jet, we are experiencing the same underlying phenomenon. Gimbel isn't saying that only a Jew could have discovered these things but that being Jewish just might have given Einstein an edge. In any case, someone like Lenard could not have made such leaps. His German physics, with its constipated view of science, was becoming as anachronistic as his politics. If you can look past anti-Semitism, Steven Gimbel suggests, maybe relativity is 'Jewish science' after all. George Johnson is the author of eight books, including "Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order" and "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-century Physics." 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 we are 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. In "Why Does the World Exist?," Jim Holt, an elegant and witty writer comfortably at home in the problem's weird interzone between philosophy and scientific cosmology, sets out in search of such answers. He takes inspiration from readings of Heidegger and Sartre, and from something Martin Amis once said in a television interview: "We're at least five Einsteins away from answering that question." Holt, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, speculates that some of these Einsteins might be at work already. "If I could find one, or maybe two or three or even four of them, and then sort of arrange them in the right order," he says amiably, "well, that would be an excellent quest." In fact, he finds eight thinkers worthy of a chapter each, as well as some bit-players like a Zen Buddhist who answers the question by attempting to bop Holt on the head, koan style. The Zen angle ends there, and Holt is similarly unimpressed by the approaches of monotheistic religion. So he travels to Paris, London, Oxford (several times), Pittsburgh and Austin, Tex., to meet the philosophers and cosmologists David Deutsch, Adolf Grünbaum, John Leslie, Derek Parfit, Roger Penrose, Richard Swinburne and Steven Weinberg. He also has a discussion with the philosophically inclined novelist John Updike. As he moves from one to the other, Holt learns of ever more extraordinary solutions, some almost mystical, yet rooted in solid reasoning. His first interlocutor, the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, throws down a challenge: Why be astonished at being at all? To marvel at existence is to assume that nothingness is somehow more natural, more restful. But why? The ancients started with matter, not the void; perhaps nothingness is stranger than being. Holt's other conversations are with people who do marvel at being, but they also confirm Grünbaum's point about the puzzling nature of nothingness. It is all very well to say the universe started with a Big Bang, but how? Did it burst out like "a party girl jumping out of a cake," as Fred Hoyle put it? But how can one even speak of cakes, or of "bursting out," when there is no pre-Bang time or space from which to burst? As Holt says, we tend to think of the start of the universe by analogy with a concert, where we sit fiddling with our programs until the music begins. But there is no tuning-up, no fiddling. It's hard to visualize nothingness, though Holt quotes a beautiful definition by the physicist Alex Vilenkin: "a closed spherical spacetime of zero radius." Try jumping out of that. No wonder the philosopher Robert Nozick said that "someone who proposes a nonstrange answer shows he didn't understand the question." Nozick's own hypotheses were certainly strange. One was that the primal nothingness might have been so annihilating that it annihilated itself, thus producing being. This echoes a much-mocked line of Heidegger's: "nothing noths" ("Das Nichts nichtet"). Silly as it sounds, this captures the sheer uncanniness of the Big Bang - and, as Heidegger said, the anxiety we feel in the thought of "nothing" brings us face to face with Being itself. Several of Holt's cosmologists explore the possibility of there being universes "as plentiful as blackberries" (C.S. Peirce's phrase). Universes may be popping into existence right now: each moment may generate billions of new ones. Perhaps all possible universes have existed from the start, including one that contains nothing. Perhaps everything exists because of fluctuations in quantum particles, or because an initial zero separated itself into +1 and -1, forming matter and antimatter. Perhaps only mathematical entities are real, and our physical world is an "outcropping" of mathematics. Could the world be an outcropping of consciousness? Does all nature have a subjectivity of its own? Or is the universe a device for producing goodness? There is no way to do justice to any of these theories in a brief review, but Holt traces the reasoning behind each one with care and clarity - such clarity that each idea seems resoundingly sensible even as it turns one's brain to a soup of incredulity. He is an urbane guide, involving us in his personal adventures. We join him for a weekend sipping claret and reading Parfit in a bathtub at the Athenaeum Club in London. He takes us to Paris for no good reason except to sit in the Café de Flore with a volume of Hegel. We stay with him through the death of his dog, and - movingly - even attend his mother's deathbed, where she undergoes "the infinitesimal transition from being to nothingness." Holt reminds us that no exploration of being - especially human being - can be separated from the human who undertakes it, complete with character and the play of moods. Updike felt that the universe had "a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm." Surely this was a mood, even a quirk of biochemistry, but it opens a perspective on the universe, too. The question of being itself, as Updike and Holt agree, can seem profound in one mood, vacuous in another. One evening in Oxford, Holt enjoys a fine meal and bottle of Australian shiraz, then strolls around feeling "a diffuse sense of contentment." This is one beginning for philosophy; Heidegger's "anxiety" is another (and perhaps Heidegger should have drunk more shiraz). The rest requires only a willingness to think - and I can imagine few more enjoyable ways of thinking than to read this book. Sarah Bakewell is the author of "How to Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Aesthetically, wrote Wittgenstein, the miracle is that the world exists. In his lifelong quest to penetrate this miracle and, so, to explain why there is something rather than nothing, Holt has entertained deep thoughts. Here he invites readers to join him in the intellectual explorations that sustain such thoughts. Readers share in Holt's reflections on how the universe originated, pondering the cosmogonies found in Greek philosophy and Norse mythology and interrogating the theology of creation expounded by Anselm and Aquinas. Though Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Kant dismissed the entire question of cosmic origins as an irrelevance, Holt realizes that the modern theory of the big bang has pushed that question inescapably back into view. To cope with the difficulties inherent in modern explanations of cosmic beginnings, Holt seeks out living authorities, such as historian Adolf Grunbaum and physicist Steven Weinberg, probing their views with relentless curiosity. But Holt embeds these animated interviews in a profoundly personal narrative punctuated by insistent life events, such as the abrupt death of his mother. Winding its way to no reassuringly tidy conclusion, this narrative ultimately humanizes the huge metaphysical questions Holt confronts, endowing them with real-life significance. A potent synthesis of philosophy and autobiography.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Freelance critic Holt seeks to answer the question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" He fails to fully answer, but not before reintroducing 11th-century monk Saint Anselm's ontological proof ("God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived") and its various subsequent spins laid out alongside and sometimes in opposition to the claims of evolutionary biology, neuropsychology, theoretical physics, natural religion theology, contemporary mysticism, and militant atheism. Holt, however, does not merely stage a battle of great treatises in which Newton gives way to Kant who yields to Einstein, etc. Instead-with gossipy bits preserved-he interviews several philosophers and scientists currently engaged in answering the question, including physicist David Deutsch, a nonbeliever who theorizes a "multiverse," and Richard Swinburne, a contrastingly conventional-seeming philosopher of religion whose belief in God is rooted in faith and not "pure logic." But Holt's many anecdotes do not make his difficult subject more accessible. VERDICT Holt's efforts to make the why of existence compelling to a highly sophisticated lay audience will only succeed with the most committed of the cosmologically inclined; this is really a book of philosophy to be read by philosophers and Big Theory intellectuals.-Scott H. Silverman, Richmond, IN (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A guided tour of ideas, theories and arguments about the origins of the universe. 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. Holt may not answer the question of his title, but his book deepens the appreciation of the mystery.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
