Book of the week: Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt

(Liveright, $28)

When seeking an answer to life’s most profound question, it only makes sense to look for Einsteins, said Amanda Gefter in New Scientist. Inspired by Martin Amis’s observation that we’re about five such geniuses away from explaining the universe’s existence, writer Jim Holt begins his “humorous yet deeply profound journey” by trying to assemble living candidates. Mathematician Roger Penrose, physicist Steven Weinberg, novelist John Updike, and others all entertained a question Holt borrowed from the 18th-century philosopher G.W. Leibniz: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Not that a simple answer could be drawn from any of them. The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum told Holt the question is a waste of time because our world doesn’t need explaining. “If, as Aristotle remarked, philosophy begins with wonder,” Holt writes, “then it ends with Grünbaum.”

Quite obviously, “what Holt is asking is unanswerable,” said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. Still, it’s a significant development when—while watching a French TV show in which a priest, a physicist, and a Buddhist monk debate Leibniz’s question—Holt recognizes the possibility that the universe never had a beginning. Still, he’s left unsettled by the idea that even such a universe contains an internal logic and perhaps, therefore, the key to why it exists. Unfortunately, neither physics nor mathematics nor religion can yet describe what that internal logic might be. As Nobel physicist Weinberg tells Holt, “It’s not just that we don’t have the observational data—we don’t even have the theory.”

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“So we are stuck,” said Kathryn Schulz in New York magazine. With ordinary answers out of the running, Holt derives great fun from entertaining the extraordinary ones. “This is a book that gets us to take seriously, at least for a few pages, the proposition that the universe was brought into being by the abstract idea of Goodness.” Holt even toys with Martin Heidegger’s contention that there’s a verb implicit in the word “nothing” and thus perhaps it inevitably “nothed itself,” creating Being. In the end, the author begins testing theories on feeling—whether they sound right. Which really is all we have to go by. Chucking the illusion of certainty, Holt has written a book that “does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem” and wonder.