from answering that question,” Amis replied. His estimate seemed about right to me. But, I wondered, could any of those Einsteins be around today? It was obviously not my place to aspire to be one of them. But if I could find one, or maybe two or three or even four of them, and then sort of arrange them in the right order … well, that would be an excellent quest.
So that is what I set out to do. My quest to find the beginnings of an answer to the question Why is there something rather than nothing? has had many promising leads. Some failed to pan out. Once, for instance, I called a theoretical cosmologist I knew, one noted for his brilliant speculations. I got his voice mail and said that I had a question for him. He called back and left a message on my answering machine. “Leave your question on my voice mail and I’ll leave the answer on your machine,” he said. This was alluring. I complied. When I returned to my apartment late that evening, the little light was blinking on my answering machine. With some trepidation, I pushed the playback button. “Okay,” the cosmologist’s recorded voice began, “what you’re really talking about is a violation of matter / antimatter parity …”
On another occasion, I sought out a certain well-known professor of philosophical theology. I asked him if the existence of the world could be explained by postulating a divine entity whose essence contained his existence. “Are you kidding?” he said. “God is so perfect He doesn’t have to exist!”
On still another occasion, on a street in Greenwich Village, I ran into a Zen Buddhist scholar I’d been introduced to at a cocktail party. He was said to be an authority on cosmic matters. After a little small talk, I asked him—perhaps, in retrospect, precipitately—“Why is there something rather than nothing?” In response, he tried to bop me on the head. He must have thought it was a Zen kōan.
In searching for enlightenment on the riddle of being, I cast my net fairly wide, talking to philosophers, theologians, particle physicists, cosmologists, mystics, and one very great American novelist. Above all, I looked for versatile and wide-ranging intellects. To have anything really profitable to say about why the world might exist, a thinker must possess more than one kind of intellectual sophistication. Suppose, for example, a scientist has some philosophical acumen. Then he or she might see that the “nothingness” philosophers talked about was conceptually equivalent to something scientifically definable—say, a closed four-dimensional spacetime manifold of vanishing radius. By feeding a mathematical description of this null reality into the equations of quantum field theory, one might be able to prove that a small patch of “false vacuum” had a nonzero probability of spontaneously appearing—and that this bit of vacuum, through the marvelous mechanism of “chaotic inflation,” would be sufficient to get a full-fledged universe going. If the scientist was also versed in theology, he or she might see how this cosmogonic event could be construed as a backward-in-time emanation from a future “Omega point” that has some of the properties traditionally ascribed to the Judeo-Christian deity. And so forth.
Engaging in such speculative flights takes a good deal of intellectual brio. And brio was amply on display in most of my encounters. One of the pleasures of talking to original thinkers about a matter as profound as the mystery of being is that you get to hear them think out loud. Sometimes they would say the most astonishing things. It was as though I was privileged to peer into their thought processes. This was a cause for awe. But I also found it oddly empowering. When you listen to such thinkers feel their way around the question of why there is a world at all, you begin to realize that your own thoughts on the matter are not quite so nugatory as you had imagined. No one can confidently claim intellectual superiority in the face of the mystery of existence. For, as William James observed, “All of us are beggars here.”
Interlude
Could Our World Have Been Created by a Hacker?
Where did our universe come from? Doesn’t its sheer existence point to an ultimate creative force at play? This question, when posed by a religious believer to an atheist, generally elicits one of two responses. First, the atheist might say, if you do postulate such a “creative force,” you’d better be prepared to postulate another one to explain