Wherein I shovel some (un?)seriously scientistic caca into the sewer of nada.
Why Do Some Physicists Talk Nonsense about Nothing?
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4 responses to “Why Do Some Physicists Talk Nonsense about Nothing?”
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I took a crack at this some years ago: https://politicsandprosperity.com/2012/05/17/something-from-nothing/. (You are quoted.)
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Bill, Krauss’s waffling strikes me as, to quote a comment I made elsewhere, as an “explanation” that “bottoms out swiftly, and in plain sight, on some proposition that calls out for explanation and hasn’t got one”.
Krauss, if he were honest and frank, would at least admit that he is smuggling in the laws of physics (regarding the behavior of the quantum vacuum) as a brute fact, but he correctly intuits that, for most people, this would render his “explanation” unsuccessful — because most people feel in their bones (as an axiom) that a brute fact really explains nothing. So he simply pretends that he’s found the bottom-most turtle, and of course Harris doesn’t call him on it.
I suspect that he knows perfectly well that his redefinition of “nothing” is a cheat and a deflection — but in his position, what else has he got? -
Malcolm,
Good comment. I was focused more on the semantic mischief Krauss is perpetrating, whereas you are explaining his motive for perpetrating it. -
To quote Bertrand Russell (as I did in that other thread, but without attribution):
“The method of ‘postulating’ what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.”
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