As a matter of fact, arrogance and greed, and any other positive and negative adjectives that reflect someone’s character, stem from one’s imagination. A greedy person envisions more wealth, or whatever the greed is all about. An arrogant person envisions grandiose. The artist of approximately 40,000 years ago who painted drawings of animals on the walls of El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain, used his or her imagination and drew those pictures from what was originally viewed in the nature. Portraits and landscapes are painted mostly based on the artist’s memory combined with inspiration. Even abstract paintings are based on this combination. Another form of imagination is envisioning reasons for unexplained. For instance, when the reason for thunder was not known, it was believed to be as a result of God’s wrath.
Another example is a different theory which was based on some evidence of the formation of the universe. This resulted in the theory of the Big Bang, which proved to be a fact in later years. A theory or a hypothesis is visualization of an event or an effect, based on a cause or an experiment or some evidence. Thus, explanation of a phenomenon according to how it sounds or looks (God’s wrath) without any scientific backup, is not a theory but a baseless invention, and sometimes hallucination! However, they are both products of our imagination and abstract thinking. One may note here that easy answers to hard questions should call for skepticism. When one invents a supreme power as the creator of everything, our brain can conceive and comprehend attempts of some charlatan (to borrow the phrase attributed to Voltaire: the first prophet was the first charlatan meeting the first idiot) to claim to be His agent. There is an anecdote that someone is passing through a village and claims to be the God. Some villager pulls him aside and informs him that, in prior years someone claimed merely to be a prophet, and people of the village, whom can hardly be fooled, hanged him. The swindler responds that, people did the right thing as that guy claiming to be the prophet was indeed not his agent! When such agents of God succeed in convincing people, they offer some social changes, which is perhaps an improvement to the existing social tradition of people. Thus, sooner or later those prophets’ moral teachings become outdated, and their explanation of the universe and the material world prove to be wrong by science. Then, modern day charlatans whose benefits are maintaining the status quo, start interpreting and annotating the outdated, in order to keep their empires flourish. The best examples of such empires are Vatican for Christians, Mecca for Muslims, Jerusalem for Jews, and Tibet for Buddhists. To sum it up, people are cheated as a result of their own ignorance, and due to the fear of unknown.
Invention of flying machines is credited to Da Vinci’s vision in his drawings, and invention of submarines is credited to Jules Verne’s vision in a science-fiction novel. Our scientific and technological progresses are the result of some forward thinking visionaries. A scientific vision, theory or hypothesis can be proven when it works, in the case of flying and underwater machines, or when there are enough evidence gathered, in the case of the Big Bang.
Lawrence Krauss, a modern day visionary, has a recent book titled “A Universe from Nothing”, in which he offers such hypothesis as the universe came about from “nothing” 13.72 billion years ago. The book (and Lawrence Krauss’s speeches about the same subject on Internet) opens the door to the possibility that all the energy that caused the event of the Big Bang, emerged from nothing. This may not answer the childish dispute between theists and atheists of “who made God- who made Big Bang”, but it offers a theory that Lawrence Krauss attempts to research the possibility of. The “nothing” in this book is not like anything we have ever known! As the author explains in the book, the word “nothing” implies no space, light, or matter. However, it is as hard to envision such notion as it is to comprehend the Black Hole. One has to attempt to step outside of this globe (earth) in order to be able to follow the adventures toured in this book. However, If the base of this theory is other theories, such as antimatter and antiparticle, would it be constructed on shaky foundations? Although Krauss tries in different pages and in different ways to explain that his “nothing” is not supernatural but physical, it is not easy for a lay person to grasp the difference. On the other hand, for a non-scientist such as the author of this article, the book offers invaluable information easy-to-read explanation of the intricate system of the universe that is thrilling and educating. Krauss begins the book by challenging the reader with the notion that in science the question is not “why” but “how”. This is indeed the first crucial step, in order to understand the importance of works of those who struggle to find mechanics and workings of this magnanimous space, instead of asking the reason for its existence; the answer of which does not even fit in the realm of the scientific knowledge of today. In fact, some of the explanations such as dark matter and dark energy and black hole and antimatter, and even the size of the universe, are sometimes ambiguous in nature: “We have discovered that 99% of the universe is invisible to us, comprising dark matter that is most likely some new form of elementary particle, and even more dark energy, whose origin remains a complete mystery at the present time.” We see our three dimensional world and we feel the fourth dimension, as we consider speed and as we age. Conceiving any other dimension beyond those is proven to be difficult! However, in studying the universe, it is necessary to step outside of our planet and expand our imagination. This book is helpful in guiding us through such difficulties. At the minimum, one can learn explanations to many facts and hypothesis laid out in this book, such as: flat universe, the age of the Big Bang, galaxies (more than 400 billion), nebula, cluster and super cluster, static universe, multiverse, and many other astronomical terminologies whose meanings are refreshing to learn. Whether “A Universe from Nothing” can prove a point or not, it contains invaluable ideas that stem from the author’s knowledge of the subject, imagination and vision into the universe.
