A Universe From Nothing - Book Review

As hurricane Sandy ravaged New York City and the rest of the North East, it was an ideal time to hunker down and finish the latest book I was reading. While nature wreaked havoc all around, coupled with the contents of the book, it was obvious yet again that reality is much more awe inspiring than fairytale.

Lawrence Krauss is one of the leading names in cosmology and theoretical physics, and is the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He has written a number of popular science books.

A Universe From Nothing gives an account of the latest findings in cosmology, and attempts to bring some light as to why there is something rather than nothing. It turns out that there is a lot going on in "nothing", and it has nothing to do with the supernatural. We are told about the breakthroughs of science over the course of the last century and more, right up to the knowledge of matter and anti-matter particles popping in and out of existence within empty space. 

It's an invigorating subject, and the book was spawned from the popularity of a lecture that Krauss did back in 2009, which has had over 1.6 million youtube hits at the time of writing. 

The original lecture is below and well worth your time.

Krauss' style is sharp, incredibly witty and filled with humour but perhaps most distinctly, very quick-fire. This style is also prominent in the book, and in terms of being quick-fire, perhaps to its detriment. I found myself struggling to keep up with the content somewhat and this is either my fault for simply failing to grasp some of the information, Krauss' fault for not explaining them well enough, or the fact that the subject matters are simply quite difficult in the first place! Perhaps the book needed to be longer than just under 200-pages to flesh out all the ins and outs. However, despite sometimes being hard to follow, the overall picture is clear, reality is the way that it is and not the way we would like it to be.


I had the pleasure of seeing one of his lectures earlier this year at the Hayden planetarium, where I also purchased the book. Krauss is a fantastic public speaker, thoroughly engaging and funny, and aided by various slides, was much more digestible than the book. The lecture was similar to the one posted above, but updated a little more, including indulging in some of the backpedaling that theologians and philosophers have had to go through as we start to know more about what nothing is. If you ever get the chance to see him lecture, do so.

Christopher Hitchens was going to write the foreword for the book, but had to stop when he became too sick, apparently he was about halfway done. I spoke to Professor Krauss about Hitch after the event and you could sense their friendship and admiration he had for him.

In Christopher's absence, Richard Dawkins wrote the afterword and gives the book a ringing endorsement, perhaps overly enthusiastic, but nobody writes better than Dawkins when trying to highlight the virtues and inspiration of science.

I also managed to meet Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who introduced the lecture and stayed around afterwards. It took me about an hour to meet him as other people muscled in ahead (I think I'm just too nice to do that...), but it was a thrill to hear him debate with various people who had somewhat deluded views... it's amazing to see so many people appear to be disappointed that the world is not going to end in the near future through a variety of reasons (Mayan calendar, giant asteroid, etc, etc). One person even said to him "Genesis is mostly true...", I applaud Neil's patience as he must have heard all of these things before, but seems to treat each occasion with a feverish enthusiasm for the virtues of science.

Overall, I would say the book is a good read, but I couldn't help but feel that I was missing something. One of religions last cards is "why is there something rather than nothing?", but we are very close to having a plausible scientific explanation for just that cowardly fallback into the unknown that theologians cling to (even though in the highly unlikely event there is a god, it's even more unlikely it's the god as described by any of the worlds religions...). 

The book perhaps does not answer what "nothing" is to the satisfaction of all, because people can reframe what "nothing" is to fit their own agendas, the book is upfront about what notions of "nothing" are being dealt with, and given the advances of the last hundred years, perhaps even experts at obfuscation will ultimately be left dumbfounded in the future.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Book Review

I bought this book, and wrote a blog about it back in November last year, it's a hefty read for a hefty subject and took longer to finish than I'd have liked (a transatlantic move, among other things, got in the way somewhat), but I felt compelled to write a proper review once I was finished.

We've all thought at some point things like "if only everyone thought like me the world would be a better place!", I'd like to propose that if everyone read this book then the world would be a better place.

That isn't to say that Steven Pinker has solved the worlds problems, far from it,  The Better Angels of Our Nature gives us an analysis of the history of violence; from the rate of wars, battle deaths, murder, torture, rape, etc, and the reasons (or potential reasons) for their declines (though it has not been a steady one).

The book pulls no punches in describing various acts of violence, it is not for the faint of heart, but we are not talking about gratuitous descriptions of violence here, it's hard to sugar-coat breaking on the wheel for example. The fact that it's intuitive to recoil in horror at many of the practices that were once commonplace is in itself indicative.

Violence can often be an emotive subject, and most of the objections I have had to deal with when discussing this topic tend to get clouded in personal anecdotes and an inability to consider the vast span of historical time that Pinker has analysed. The first thing to realise upon being faced with statistics on death and violence is not to take anything away from what is still happening today, terrible things still happen and always will, but the world as a whole is less terrible than it was. One also has to remember that behind every number is a life taken too early or inhumanly abused, families robbed of loved ones via spear, machete, bullets, explosions and methods of torture that one can scarcely comprehend. For some of these victims, death must have been a relief.

A further objection I have dealt with is that people claim that the data are simply wrong and that the nature of statistics can show anything (although it's also curious to note that the people I have spoken to have not read the book nor have any interest in doing so), but Pinker is very analytical of the data itself and gives full disclosure of the sources (there are 200 pages of notes and sources). Some people claim that battle deaths in recent wars today are not fully reported (though death in war is just one form of violence analysed in the booked). Even if that were the case they seem to be willfully ignorant of the fact that reported battle deaths will be prone to errors in all wars and not just those of today, but more importantly the number of unreported battle deaths would have to be so high (to compete with past atrocities) it would be a conspiracy greater than a faked moon landing or government involvement in 9/11.

One has to zoom out a little bit (or a lot, in some cases) and look at the big picture, while it's tempting to consider the 20th century as the most violent of all time, this table (reproduced from the book) paints a different picture of histories bloodiest events by recalibrating the death toll to 20th century population equivalents (so they can be compared fairly):

Worst atrocities

	Conflict	Century	Death toll*	Death toll (20C equivalent)**	Ranking
1	Second world war	20th	55 million	55M	9
2	Mao Zedong (mostly government-caused famine)	20th	40M	40M	11
3	Mongol conquest	13th	40m	278m	2
4	An Lushan revolt	8th	36m	429m	1
5	Fall of the Ming dynasty	17th	25m	112m	4
6	Taiping rebellion	19th	20m	40M	10
7	Annihilation of the American Indians	15th-19th	20m	92m	7
8	Josef Stalin	20th	20m	20m	15
9	Middle East slave trade	7th-19th	18m	132m	3
10	Atlantic slave trade	15th-19th	18m	83m	8
11	Timur Lenk	14th-15th	17m	100m	6
12	British India (mostly preventable famine)	19th	17m	35m	12
13	First world war	20th	15m	15m	16
14	Russian civil war	20th	9m	9m	20
15	Fall of Rome	3rd-5th	8m	105m	5
16	Congo Free State	19th-20th	8m	12m	18
17	Thirty years' war	17th	7m	32m	13
18	Russia's “time of troubles”	16th-17th	5m	23m	14
19	Napoleonic wars	19th	4m	11m	19
20	Chinese civil war	20th	3m	3m	21
21	French wars of religion	16th	3m	14m	17
*Median/mode of figures cited in encyclopaedias or histories. Includes battlefield and civilian deaths
**Deaths were calculated against global population at time, then scaled up to mid-20th century level

When we see that World War 2 barely scrapes into the top 10, it's cause for contemplation. Few people tend to take stock of the fact that European countries tended to initiate two or three wars per year leading up to 20th century (a brief glance at wiki's list of conflicts in Europe gives the scroll button a sprinting start but a strolling end) . We have had an unprecedented peace since WW2 by comparison, which is known as "the long peace".

The world is not a perfect place, and violence is part of human nature (though so are inclinations towards peace, it would seem), but by studying the trends of history, our psychology and having a greater understanding of what indicators influence violence, we can concentrate on what "works" and what doesn't. While violence may well go up in the future, I can't see a situation in a developed society where many of the victories of the rights revolution (in terms of race, gender, etc, etc) are going to be unwon, it's unthinkable that segregation will come back or that women will have their right to vote taken away, these are humanistic victories that we now take for granted. Not to mention the abolition of slavery, witch-hunts (60,000-100,000 Witches were killed over history thanks to biblical instruction) Let's be grateful for the gigantic strides that have been made in most societies.

As a more humorous analogy, I consider what Louis CK says here, Everything's Amazing and Nobody is Happy:

Of course, not everything IS amazing, there are still horrific acts of violence happening every day, but things are better. As Pinker says in this interview, "My first edict as global overlord would be to impose the following rule on pundits: No one may bemoan a decay, decline, or degeneration without providing (1) a measure of the way the world is today; (2) a measure of the way the world was at some point in the past; (3) a demonstration that (1) is worse than (2)."

What is amazing, is The Better Angels of Our Nature.

9.9/10

The Better Angels of Our Nature

We are constantly bombarded from all directions with news stories and images of various atrocities throughout the world, so it's no surprise that when someone claims that we're actually living in the most peaceful time in human history, a few heads are turned. This is the claim that cognitive scientist, Steven Pinker, has made in his latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

I haven't read the book yet and am looking forward to doing so (it is a whopping 800-or-so pages, but such a subject is deserving of a full analysis). I did, however, have the pleasure of seeing him do a lecture about his new book at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on the 3rd of November. Unfortunately it wasn't possible for Steven to use a screen to emphasise some of his points with various charts and images, but it just made for more emphasis on what he actually had to say. While violence has not decreased to 0 and there are no guarantees that violence will not increase again in the future, there are reasons to be cheerful.

It seems Pinker has the empirical evidence to back up his claims (the list of source data is hefty), even the catastrophic wars and regimes of the 20th century are part of this decline in violence, it almost seems natural to think that it was the most violent time in human history, but as a % of the world population, World War II barely scrapes into the top ten of the most horrible events of all time. People never seem to cite pre-20th century atrocities in the first place (the Triple Alliance War is thought to have decimated 60% of the population of Paraguay, for example). To justify his claims, Pinker has to account for violent deaths as a % of the world population which may seem a copout for some who could say that a rise in the absolute number of violent deaths would be cause for concern (WWII is the deadliest in terms of absolute numbers), but it's the only fair way to gauge violence over the ages. If you consider that % of world population is not a fair measurement you run into some problems (both morally and rationally). Here is a passage of the book that goes a little way to explaining why a violent deaths as a % of world population is the best way to measure violence over history:

As I note in the book,  “Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, `If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?’ [Either way, we are led to] the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.”

There are many reasons speculated for the decline of violence, abolition of slavery (as of 1980 slavery is now illegal everywhere on the planet) and witchunts, humanitarian and equal rights movements, etc. Printing and literacy get high praise and other enlightenment values, when knowledge and reason have surpassed superstition and ignorance then there is no reason to be violent towards certain groups. Also the increase of literacy can increase the amount of empathy in the world, imagining what it is like to be someone else, is cited as a potential reason. Pinker shows that human nature is complex and while we still have inclinations to be violent, we also have historical circumstances that favour peaceful intentions.

This is not the lecture I witnessed but it is the lecture with which he is currently touring:

I got my books signed afterward (I also have a copy of Words and Rules) and he was kind enough to pose for a photo. It's also interesting to know that Pinker carries a gene that causes baldness in 80% in carriers, clearly he is in the 20%!

So, if Pinker is right (and I think he is), we should be optimistic and even more grateful for enlightenment principles than perhaps we take for granted, but it's important to remember that there is no guarantee that violence will continue to decrease and it would seem foolish to ever speculate it would become 0 (a point he stresses himself). It seems while we need to concentrate on what we as a species has done "right" over history to drive violence down, we shouldn't get complacent. It strikes me that while idiotic ideologies are still rife in the world, coupled with an increase in technology, it may become possible for fewer people to inflict more destruction on more people with less effort. While we still have irrational superstition in the world, and people who are willing to kill in the name of iron age mythology, we have reason to be wary. It seems obvious that reason and rationality will be the driving force towards a more peaceful future if we are to reach one on a much larger global scale.

Since this post, I have read the book, my review is here.