
A Universe From Nothing
Physicist Lawrence Krauss argues that the universe could have arisen from nothing at all, and lays out the evidence in a talk that moves from Edwin Hubble's expanding universe to dark energy and the eventual fate of the cosmos. He walks through how quantum fluctuations can produce particles out of empty space, why the total energy of the universe may actually add up to zero, and what that implies for the old philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing. Krauss leans on his background writing about physics for general audiences, including his work on "The Physics of Star Trek," and keeps the tone informal, cracking jokes between explanations of vacuum energy and cosmic inflation. The talk is delivered to a live audience with slides showing telescope data and diagrams of spacetime, and it ends with Krauss's own answer to the nothing-to-something problem, framed as a physical question rather than a theological one.