Why Does the World Exist

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

By Jim Holt

Liveright (July 16, 2012)

After spending weeks watching The Matrix Of Illusion which deals with the interplay between consciousness, quantum mechanics and the very fabric of the universe – coming across “Why Does the World Exist by Jim Holt at Wellington airport was sheer synchronicity.

This has been a book that I haven’t been able to put down….Holt, an elegant and witty writer seem comfortable at home in the problem’s weird inter-zone between philosophy and scientific cosmology, sets out in search of such answers.

After all, 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?

Early philosophers and great thinkers hadn’t asked the most fundamental question of all why anything is there at all. Why is there a world? 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?’ ”

So Holt travels to Paris, London, Oxford, Pittsburgh and Austin to meet the philosophers and cosmologists David Deutsch, Adolf Grünbaum, John Leslie, Derek Parfit, Roger Penrose, Richard Swinburne and Steven Weinberg. As he moves from one to the other, Holt learns of ever more extraordinary solutions, some almost mystical, yet rooted in solid reasoning.

In doing so, this book takes on an interesting form with a meaty dense center to each chapter surrounded by the light and fluffy bread of Holt's expert writing about the settings, weather and food of his travels. While this consequently lacks the characteristics of a heady hard hitting original philosophical work, these sandwiches should prove quite palatable for most readers.

Why Does the World Exist? criss-crosses the etymological, epistemological, theological and philosophical aspects of its title while remaining a fairly easy read.