In un’intervista a cura di Ross Andersen pubblicata nell’aprile del 2012 su The Atlantic, il fisico e divulgatore statunitense Lawrence Krauss, autore del celebre saggio La fisica di Star Trek (1995), discuteva del suo ultimo libro – pubblicato pochi mesi prima – intitolato A Universe from Nothing (L’universo dal nulla), rispondendo quindi alle critiche e approfondendo alcuni concetti sulle origini del cosmo. Nel corso dell’intervista, Krauss rifletteva sul rapporto tra fisica e filosofia e sull’importanza dell’utilizzo di una terminologia chiara e corretta nei lavori di divulgazione. Inoltre si soffermava sull’ipotesi del multiverso, spiegando come questa possibilità metta in crisi la religione.

Andersen: I think the problem for me, coming at this as a layperson, is that when you’re talking about the explanatory power of science, for every stage where you have a “something,”—even if it’s just a wisp of something, or even just a set of laws—there has to be a further question about the origins of that “something.” And so when I read the title of your book, I read it as “questions about origins are over.”

Krauss: Well, if that hook gets you into the book that’s great. But in all seriousness, I never make that claim. In fact, in the preface I tried to be really clear that you can keep asking “Why?” forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can’t answer, but if we can answer the “How?” questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter. And it may just be an infinite set of questions, but what I point out at the end of the book is that the multiverse may resolve all of those questions. From Aristotle’s prime mover to the Catholic Church’s first cause, we’re always driven to the idea of something eternal. If the multiverse really exists, then you could have an infinite object—infinite in time and space as opposed to our universe, which is finite. That may beg the question as to where the multiverse came from, but if it’s infinite, it’s infinite. You might not be able to answer that final question, and I try to be honest about that in the book. But if you can show how a set of physical mechanisms can bring about our universe, that itself is an amazing thing and it’s worth celebrating. I don’t ever claim to resolve that infinite regress of why-why-why-why-why; as far as I’m concerned it’s turtles all the way down. The multiverse could explain it by being eternal, in the same way that God explains it by being eternal, but there’s a huge difference: the multiverse is well motivated and God is just an invention of lazy minds.

Immagine da Flickr – Marc Soller.