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The Washington Post Notable Non-Fiction of 2013
“I can imagine few more enjoyable ways of thinking than to read this book.”―Sarah Bakewell, New York TimesBook Review, front-page review
- Sales Rank: #117385 in Books
- Brand: Jim Holt
- Published on: 2013-04-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .56 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
- Why Does the World Exist An Existential Detective Story
Review
Starred review. Winding its way to no reassuringly tidy conclusion, this narrative ultimately humanizes the huge metaphysical questions Holt confronts, endowing them with real-life significance. A potent synthesis of philosophy and autobiography.
If Jim Holt's deft and consuming Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story has anything to tell us, it's that such a comment is less about literary riffing than deep philosophy. --David Ulin
A guided tour of ideas, theories and arguments about the origins of the universe.... Through discussions with philosophers of religion and science, humanists, biologists, string theorists, as well as research into the scholarship of days past--from Heidegger, Parmenides, Pythagoras and others--and an interview with John Updike, Holt provides a master's-level course on the theories and their detractors. The interludes find the author positioning himself as an existential gumshoe, but also working through the sudden loss of a pet and, later, the death of his mother. Holt may not answer the question of his title, but his book deepens the appreciation of the mystery.
The pleasure of this book is watching the match: the staggeringly inventive human mind slamming its fantastic conjectures over the net, the universe coolly returning every serve.... Holt traffics in wonder, a word whose dual meanings--the absence of answers; the experience of awe--strike me as profoundly related. His book is not utilitarian. You can't profit from it, at least not in the narrow sense.... And yet it does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem. --Kathryn Schulz
Why is the universe characterized by such abundance and complexity? Why does it exist at all? How did it come into being? Could there have been something else instead? Could there have been nothing else--that is, nothingness--instead? Is the human mind capable of resolving these matters? Can anyone do justice to all this in a 279-page book? I can answer only the last of these questions. Yes, someone can: Jim Holt, in Why Does the World Exist --Andrew Sullivan
He [Jim Holt] leaves us with the question Stephen Hawking once asked but couldn't answer, 'Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?' --Ron Rosenbaum
There could have been nothing. It might have been easier. Instead there is something. The universe exists, and we are here to ask about it. Why? In Why Does the World Exist?, Jim Holt, an elegant and witty writer comfortably at home in the problem's weird interzone between philosophy and scientific cosmology, sets out in search of such answers. ...There is no way to do justice to any of these theories in a brief review, but Holt traces the reasoning behind each one with care and clarity--such clarity that each idea seems resoundingly sensible even as it turns one's brain to a soup of incredulity.... I can imagine few more enjoyable ways of thinking than to read this book. --Sarah Bakewell
It's the mystery William James called "the darkest in all philosophy" "[W]hy is there something rather than nothing?" For Jim Holt, it is a question that may never find an answer, but one endlessly worth asking. In this highly engaging book, Holt visits great thinkers in mathematics, quantum physics, artificial intelligence, theology, philosophy, and literature. These conversations don't lead him toward any conclusion, but they make for a lively, thoughtful read, whether your worldview tends toward Spinoza (in which "reality is a self-sustaining causal loop: the world creates us, and we in turn create the world") or like Stephen Hawking, still searching for the final theory of everything.Holt is a generous guide, laying out a brief history of how philosophers have approached these questions before bringing us along on his tour of modern thinkers--some of whom are also fairly eccentric, hilarious talkers. The author's willingness to include his personal struggles with being and nothingness--as when he faces the death first of his dog, then of his mother--grounds the book in intimate, humane terms. We may never know why the universe exists, but we know how to grieve those who exit it. --Kate Tuttle
In Why Does the World Exist? Mr. Holt picks up this question about being versus nothingness and runs quite a long and stylish way with it. He combines his raffish erudition with accounts of traveling to tap the minds of cosmologists, theologians, particle physicists, philosophers, mystics and others. --Dwight Garner
So much in middle-class life and literature is rote: We decide what to have for dinner, we floss, we pick up something to read. Hurray for Jim Holt, who cracks our formulaic stupor with his crisp, jolly new book, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story. Already, I've started a list of folk who will find it gift-wrapped from me at the holidays. --Karen R. Long
An elegant and witty writer converses with philosophers and cosmologists who ponder the question of why there is something rather than nothing.
Back and forth he goes between scientists and philosophers, testing the contentions of one against the theories of the other. --Jeremy Bernstein
... an eclectic mix of theology, cutting-edge science (of the cosmological and particle-physics variety) and extremely abstract philosophising, rendered (mostly) accessible by Mr. Holt's facility with analogies and clear, witty language.
A reminder that the quest for foundational truths is not only a supremely human activity but also one that brings us, if not absolute truth (which may be unknowable), at least better and better approximations of the truth... A gifted essayist and critic... Holt intersperses his intellectual investigation with brief but revealing glimpses of his own life, including the death of his mother, when existential musings on the nature of being seem anything but abstract. --Jay Tolson
[Holt] is a spirited interlocutor and a deft explainer, patiently making sense of subjects ranging from Platonism to quantum mechanics, while nonetheless marveling at their seemingly fantastical nature... This cheerful persistence--combined with anecdotes celebrating the thrills of travel, good food, and drink--helps to sweeten what is, finally, a somber vision, in which reality may take the form of 'infinite mediocrity' and 'the life of the universe, like each of our lives, may be a mere interlude between two nothings.'
Holt writes a warm, humane, funny, gripping and poignant tale about Being and Nothingness in the 21st century, a book that every educated person should read. His 'detective story' hides a winsome primer on the big questions of life, which no one--except the most ignorant or self-absorbed--can afford to avoid. --Arlice Davenport
Holt has a religious temperament, if not a religion, and he thinks the notion of God is a possible explanation of the mystery of being rather than the reverse or the refusal of one... [He] is an expert juggler of the paradoxes that go with so many kinds of negation...the fun of his quest has to do not only with what he wants to know but with his eagerness for live dialogue. --Michael Wood"
The author takes on the origin of everything in this wonderfully ambitious book encompassing mathematics, theology, physics, ethics and more. --Michael S. Roth"
About the Author
Jim Holt, a prominent essayist and critic on philosophy, mathematics, and science, is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
429 of 448 people found the following review helpful.
Something from nothing
By Ashutosh S. Jogalekar
Reading this book feels like working out in one of the finest philosophical and intellectual gyms in town. In it Jim Holt takes us on a journey which tackles one of the oldest and most profound questions that humans have asked; "Why is there something instead of nothing?". To his credit Holt does not try to answer the question but instead leads us through a set of meetings with some of today's leading philosophers and scientists who all have their own fascinating takes on the problem. Holt starts the book with accounts of different schools of philosophy which have tried to stake out paths from something to nothing. It turns out that it's far from easy to define the existence of "nothing" partly since the very entity defining that nothing is something. Interestingly a few of the philosophical attempts also fly in the face of the latest insights from theoretical physics, and in fact one of the goals of the book is to demonstrate the creative tension between science and philosophy, hinting that both disciplines will continue to learn much from each other. To explain nothingness, philosophers resort to various logical proofs of God and existence while physicists think that the universe could have been a random quantum fluctuation that fed upon itself. Listing various attempts to explain nothing and something, Holt dwells on the work of thinkers like Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer and Leibniz, giving us a sampling of philosophical speculations on the question over the last five hundred years or so.
The heart of the book however involves Holt's conversations with some very smart thinkers even as he criss-crosses the globe and spends his time in French cafes contemplating the quirks and facts of his own existence, sometimes poignantly so as he thinks about the demise of his dog and then even more sadly of his mother (practical instances of the transformation of something into nothing?). Holt's accounts of these encounters are in equal parts clear, moving and enormously intellectually stimulating, making us confront a wide variety of questions about meaning and existence. Some of the conversations feel like intellectual ping-pong, and Holt's great strength is his ability to ask these people tough questions and spar with them on an equal level; this turns the interviews into exchanges of real substance rather than simple Q&A sessions. Among the cast of fascinating characters that Holt talks to are celebrated scientists, philosophers and writers. For instance there is the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne who thinks that the simplest explanation for the presence of such a complicated universe is that it must be created by God. Then there's the Oxford physicist David Deutsch who is convinced of the existence of multiple universes, a fact which then posits our universe as simply one of many other worlds, albeit one containing sentient humans. An even more bizarre idea comes from the physicist Andre Linde who is sympathetic to the existence of our universe as a simulation created by other sentient beings with awesome powers of matter and energy creation. A healthy antidote to those who seem astonished by the complexities of our cosmos comes from the Pittsburgh philosopher Adolf Grünbaum who thinks there's no reason to be awed by the presence of something and that a fondness for considering nothing to be the "natural" state of the universe is really rooted in Judeo-Christian philosophy which imparts special significance to creation. Many of these thinkers hold diverse and even opposite views of the topic, but it's clearly this variety that makes pondering the question such an intellectual treat.
There are many others who Holt talks to, including the Platonist mathematician Roger Penrose, the writer John Updike and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. From a scientific viewpoint the cleverest idea seems to come from the physicist Alex Vilenkin who defines nothingness as the result of a sphere of spacetime shrinking to zero radius; presumably the universe could then arise out of this nothingness as a quantum fluctuation. As noted above, Holt's meetings with all these thinkers are interspersed with poignant personal ruminations about life, death and existence, mostly done while lounging around in the French cafe that Sartre frequented. Interludes between conversations cover a smattering of related topics, including various logical proofs for God's existence and Holt's own criticisms of them; in Holt we find a penetrating thinker who is entirely capable of asking the most revealing questions about the topic. In addition many of the discussions are spiced with humor. Ultimately Holt does not find the final answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing", but I don't think he is disappointed. Neither are we. This is one of those cases where the journey is far more important than the destination; like the traveler in C. P. Cavafy's poem "Ithaca", it's the sights and sounds that we see on the way which really count. The investigation exemplifies the kinds of deep questions that humans are capable of addressing through science, philosophy, literature and poetry. We should all be glad that there are people who think about these questions in such deep and diverse ways, and we can thank Jim Holt for being a patient, witty, insightful and poignant guide on this wonderful journey.
46 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
Yes, philosophy can be fun
By The philosopher
As the book's title suggests, the question that animates Holt is, "Why does the world exist?" By "the world," Holt means everything that exists, not just the Earth. Of course, Holt's question only makes sense if there are other possible ways things could have been, and Holt thinks that there are. In fact, there are infinitely many other alternative possibilities. The simplest is that nothing at all exists, and but there also are infinite variations on how an existing world could be, with different features and/or histories. So, given all of those possibilities, why do we have the world we have? Holt also is curious about why the world we live in has its many improbable features that have permitted intelligent life to emerge--does the unlikelihood of such a world provide evidence of a benign God who designed this world to support human life?
The subtitle of the book is "An Existential Detective Story," and Holt is cast as the p.i. and leading scientists and philosophers are cast as the experts he consults to untangle the mystery. Holt got access to top-flight thinkers, so the conversations take place at a high level, but Holt does a masterful job explaining the background material so that an attentive reader can follow the twists and turns of the conversations. Holt generally doesn't go deeply into the science, so if you want a book that thoroughly explains, say, quantum physics or the big bang, you should look elsewhere, but Holt provides enough background so that the reader can assess the pros and cons of the scientists' ideas about why the world exists. Holt generally provides more thorough explanations of philosophical theories that arise in the book. I am a professional philosopher, so I am better equipped to analyze how well he handles the philosophical parts of the book, and I'd say he acquits himself very well, showing a masterful ability to make these abstract and difficult philosophical ideas come alive.
Like when tackling a detective novel, the reader spends much of our time inside the head of the p.i. (Holt) as he thinks through the mystery at the heart of the book, but Holt is not cogitating alone: Many chapters involve Holt interviewing prominent philosophers or scientists. Although Holt lets the other person drive the conversation, Holt is not just passively taking notes--he asks insightful and interesting questions and raises important objections. Holt is a generous conversationalist who is open to exploring ideas, however counter-intuitive and surprising they may be. At the end of the conversation, Holt tells the reader what he took away of value from the conversation, as more pieces of the puzzle of existence come into place. Near the end of the book, Holt offers his own answer to the question of why the world exists, an answer heavily influenced by the work of the English philosopher Derek Parfit, whom Holt talked to in the previous chapter. Has Holt unlocked the mystery of existence? That is for each reader to decide, but I found Holt's answer to be fascinating.
Holt's book differs from most "academic" works of philosophy in that he personalizes the issues and thinkers. He ties our interest in nothingness to our fear of death, which is our own inevitable plunge into nothingness, and he probes the personalities and biographies of the scientists and philosophers he interviews for a window into why they gravitate to different types of answers about why the world exists. His "investigation" is as much about human hopes and fears as it is about the mysteries of existence, as we see when he copes with the death of his mother and of his pet and thinks about what it means for a conscious being to no longer exist, to return to the void.
The only criticism I have of the book--a criticism that would make me drop the book's rating to 4.5 stars--is that its organization can be haphazard. This may be an inevitable byproduct of the author's method of talking with so many different people, but certain ideas, such as the physicists' concept of a "multi-verse," come up in different chapters where they get different partial explanations; the book would be clearer with a single, more comprehensive explanation earlier in the book. Indeed, I sometimes found myself thinking, "Didn't I read about this in an earlier chapter?" but not remembering exactly where. It can be hard to find those passages in earlier chapters because the chapter titles usually don't announce clearly whom Holt is talking to in that chapter. Because I had the Kindle edition of the book, the book's index, which references page numbers in the printed volume, was useless. (Of course, the Kindle edition has a search function.)
The copy of the Kindle edition looked clean to me. I noticed no typos, except for a possible mistake on the chart that Holt uses to explain Parfit's theory in chapter 12. I would like to look at the hardback copy of Holt's book to see whether the chart there matches the one in the Kindle. Although this point will only be of interest to people who have read through chapter 12 of the book, I'm wondering whether it is an error that the arrow that goes from "Goodness" to "Axiarchic" is x'd out as circular. If anyone has any comments on that issue, please leave them here for me.
So, if you're the least bit inclined to ask "the big questions" and want a readable, state-of-the-art introduction to where scientists and philosophers stand on trying to explain the most mind-boggling question of all, namely, why the world exists, you are fortunate to have Jim Holt as your tour guide through the intellectual wilderness. Beginners to science and philosophy and more experienced hands should all enjoy the trip.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Holt takes us to the edge of the universe but doesn't make the final leap
By Auriga
This is a wonderfully erudite tour of philosophy and to some extent metaphysics. Holt covers a broad outline of modern philosophy but tends to give the ancients short thrift and that is where the book fails. The ancients never bothered with so silly a question as, why does the world exist? They were more interested in figuring out how it existed. I've likened the modern penchant for describing or assuming that the world is self-caused to showing up at a banquet and arguing that there is no host. Holt does a wonderful job of describing the history of metaphysics with the exception of clearly distinguishing between being and Being or contingent existence and Existence. What the modern mind cannot grasp is that the Divine Mind is, as described by Frederick Wilhelmson, "radical extramentality." Wilhelmson also argues that Existence does not exist even though it makes everything else exist. Try that one on for size. If you were disappointed at Holt's skittering to a stop at the edge of Existence, you might enjoy God Has Skin in the Game: How a New Understanding of Politics and the Soul Could Change America. This is a book that answers the God Has Skin In The Game: How a New Understanding of Politics and the Soul Could Change Americaquestions that Holt describes but never fully comes to grips with.
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