American particle physicist and cosmologist
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss (born May 27, 1954) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is professor of physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and director of the Origins Project at the Arizona State University. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek.
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My area of research is something that in all fairness has no practical usability whatsoever and the thing is I'm often asked to apologize for that. It is interesting to me that people ask 'what's the point of doing that if it's not useful?' But they never ask that, or do they very rarely ask that about art or literature or music. Those things are not gonna produce a better toaster.
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Even if the asymmetry were 1 part in a billion there would be enough matter left over to account for everything we see in the universe today. In fact, an asymmetry of 1 part in a billion or so is precisely what was called for, because today there are roughly 1 billion photons in the cosmic microwave background for every proton in the universe. The CMBR photons are the remnants, in this picture, of the early matter-antimatter annihilations near the beginning of time.
The fact that we need to refine what we mean by “common sense” in order to accommodate our understanding of nature is, to me, one of the most remarkable and liberating aspects of science. Reality liberates us from the biases and misconceptions that have arisen because our intellects evolved through our animal ancestors, whose survival was based on whether predators might lurk behind trees or in caves and not on understanding the wave function of electrons in atoms. Our modern conception of the universe is so foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it. That is worth celebrating. As I describe in this book, the question and the possible answers to how something might come from nothing are even more interesting than merely the possibility of galaxies manifesting from empty space. Science provides a possible road map for the creation of space (and time) itself — and perhaps also an understanding of how the laws of physics that govern the dynamics of space and time can arise haphazardly.
In our normal experience, it is time and space that are absolute, while speed is a relative thing: how fast something is perceived to be moving depends upon how fast you yourself are moving. But as one approaches light speed, it is speed that becomes an absolute quantity, and therefore space and time must become relative!
A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.
I cannot overstress the importance of the fact that, once gravity is included in our considerations of nature, one is no longer free to define the total energy of a system arbitrarily, nor the fact that there are both positive and negative contributions to this energy…I say this because it have been argued that the statement that the average total Newtonian gravitational energy in a flat, expanding universe is arbitrary, and that any other balue would be just as good, but that scientists ‘define’ the zero point to argue against God. So claimed Dinesh D’Souza, anyway, in his debates with Christopher Hitchens on the existence of God.