What we’re reading

Stephen Hawking’s final theory:
untangling a peculiar black-hole paradox

The British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is perhaps best-known for his landmark work on black holes and, by extension, how they affect our understanding of the Universe. In the years before his death in 2018, he was still immersed in black hole theory, endeavouring to solve a puzzle that his own work had given rise to several decades earlier. To put it succinctly, in the 1970s, Hawking discovered that black holes appear to be capable of destroying physical information – a characteristic very much at odds with contemporary quantum mechanics. Adapted from a 2016 paper that Hawking co-authored with the US theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger and the UK theoretical physicist Malcolm Perry, this animation offers a sophisticated-but-digestible – and frequently quite clever – visual presentation of Hawking’s final work, which proposes one potential solution to the ‘information paradox’.

A Universe from Nothing

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing is a non-fiction book by the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, initially published on January 10, 2012 by Free Press. It discusses modern cosmogony and its implications for the debate about the existence of God. The main theme of the book is how "we have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing—involving the absence of space itself and— which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction."[1][2]

'A Universe From Nothing'
by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009

Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on Physics and Cosmology, including "The Physics of Star Trek."

Cosmological Argument

The cosmological argument is less a particular argument than an argument type. It uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from particular alleged facts about the universe (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God. Among these initial facts are that particular beings or events in the universe are causally dependent or contingent, that the universe (as the totality of contingent things) is contingent in that it could have been other than it is, that the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact possibly has an explanation, or that the universe came into being. From these facts philosophers infer deductively, inductively, or abductively by inference to the best explanation that a first or sustaining cause, a necessary being, an unmoved mover, or a personal being (God) exists that caused and/or sustains the universe. The cosmological argument is part of classical natural theology, whose goal is to provide evidence for the claim that God exists.

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