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.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Jack Dikian

July 2011

Richard Feynman’s (1918-88) semi-autobiographical books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Is something I read many years ago and again today - on a wintery Sydney day.

In 1965, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics. In a lifetime of significant achievements in physics, and perhaps his most important; work on Quantum electrodynamics giving a complete account of matter and light interaction and hence almost everything that happens in the world.

Some will know of Feynman’s famous diagrams representing the quantum field theory processes in terms of particle paths (Electron-positron annihilation examples)

In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! We find Feynman as the quintessential inquirer whose investigations led him to develop one of the most sophisticated and complex formulation describing nothing short if the very reality we percieve, and at other times to a kind of social mischief that is delightful in its purity and inspiring in its intellectual courage.

Feynman covers a range of topics throughout the course of his life, from the simple to the brilliantly exotic, showing us the inner workings of his mind as he goes from one unusual adventure to another.

This paperback is brimming with anecdotes. Consider for example – when he was working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project (read developing the atomic bomb) Feynman cracked safes containing the secrets of the bomb.

Feynman gave his first physics lecture in front of Einstein and this book and in contrast, played frigideira in a Brazilian samba band and in Las Vegas, he learned the ways of gamblers and show girls. Or the time when he decided to speak too candidly to the psychologist and got rejected from the World War II draft for mental reasons, only to later go on and be assigned to one of the biggest and most important projects in the war; the Manhattan Project.