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Lawrence Krauss’ universe is expanding — fast.
Years ago, he began studying particle physics, but that was much too
small. So Krauss went big, really big. He switched to investigating the
cosmos, because he wanted to be the first to know how the universe will
end: Will it implode or will it burn out?
Now, he knows that — and more.
Krauss studies the Big Bang, whether black holes
really exist and how to catch a bit of dark matter, the mysterious,
invisible stuff that makes up most of the universe. His books
explaining mind-bending cosmic facts in ways laymen can actually
understand have sold tens, even hundreds of thousands of copies. He’s
even been called an heir to Carl Sagan. He’s Case Western Reserve
University’s best-known professor, and probably its biggest
hell-raiser.
“Think of the giant screen behind me as the
window of a ship that will carry you through the vast expanse of our
solar system, boldly going where no man has ever gone before.” He
pauses after “going,” deadpan, almost reluctant. A few people laugh.
That “Star Trek” reference isn’t just for cliché’s sake; it’s a nod to
Krauss’ best-seller, “The Physics of Star Trek,” which uses pop science
fiction to explain what really is and isn’t possible in the universe.
“As I speak today, two lonely space travelers,
Spirit and Opportunity, are still quietly marching across the Martian
landscape, three years after landing on the Red Planet.”
That talent for drawing connections between the
imagination and science’s facts is why Krauss is here on this Sunday in
December. He’s introducing the movements of Gustav Holst’s composition
The Planets. While the orchestra plays the piece, evoking the planets’
roles in classical mythology, the screen will fill with computer
animations and actual images of the planets from NASA’s space probes.
“Gustav Holst had no idea what Mars really
looked like in 1914, but he captured the feeling of this hostile,
desolate place by connecting it to the most hostile of human
activities: war.”
Conflict has been on Krauss’ mind a lot these
days. He’s just won a victory in his long battle to defend science.
For five years, Krauss has been arguing against
introducing intelligent design, an idea that challenges the theory of
evolution, into science classes in Ohio. This fall, he helped defeat a
key member of the state school board who’d challenged evolution.
Krauss has also tangled with the Catholic
Church, arguing with a cardinal in the pages of The New York Times and
writing to Pope Benedict XVI, asking him to clarify the church’s
position on evolution. Last year, Krauss also confronted authority here
in Cleveland, on his own campus. He led a revolt against Case’s
president, Ed Hundert, organizing a faculty vote of no confidence that
quickly drove Hundert to resign.
Krauss turns to watch the screen. The orchestra begins its stark,
ominous piece, and the screen lights up with a computer image of a
spacecraft flying though Mars’ orange sky, then actual photos of the
planet’s surface: blue valleys, yellow ridges, brown craters, an
immense dark volcano bigger than Mount Everest. The piece, said to have
inspired John Williams’ “Star Wars” theme, crescendos and crashes, and
an unfurled Mars rover appears. Bows slash elegantly across the cellos
and violas, creating urgent staccato bursts. Calmly, Krauss looks back
at his stand and his script, then to the screen and the players.
When the orchestra finishes its Mars movement
and Krauss introduces Venus, something’s on his mind. He describes the
second planet’s 900-degree atmosphere, hot enough to melt lead. Its
carbon dioxide traps solar energy and converts it to heat, he explains
— a greenhouse effect, “more severe than anything Earth will experience
for more than 2 billion years, even with our current, unabated,
human-induced global warming.”
Krauss is frustrated again — this time, at the
president of the United States. His original line, which the orchestra
asked him not to read, was “even under the current administration.”
Just as Krauss thinks intelligent design seeks to replace the
scientific method with unprovable belief, just as he thinks Hundert
inspired belief in a vision for Case but couldn’t come up with the
money, so he thinks George W. Bush has avoided fighting climate change
because he won’t believe science’s warnings.
To Krauss, it’s another infuriating case of
blind faith ignoring the facts. And it’s yet another reason he feels he
can’t just be an academic scientist, but has to speak up for science,
evidence and skepticism anytime and anyplace he can.
Lawrence Krauss’ schedule would exhaust a man of
lesser energy. Ask him what he’s working on lately, and you might hear
how he flew back and forth this fall from Cleveland, where he’s on
sabbatical from Case, to Tennessee, where he’s a visiting researcher
and lecturer this year at Vanderbilt University. You might hear that he
traveled to Alberta to give a lecture and California for a conference
about science and religious belief. Or how, in one week this January,
he flew to Washington, D.C., to participate in a Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists press conference, then to Boston to speak at a symposium on
science and society, where he shared the bill with Al Gore. Get him to
slow down, and you might hear about his writing projects: An op-ed
column or book review, a book he’s finishing, a book proposal he’s
starting. Nudge him more and he might mention his research, crunching
astronomical numbers to solve interstellar mysteries.
Krauss’ life has been a Renaissance man’s fast-forward dart and dash
for more than a decade. He came to Cleveland in 1993 to chair Case’s
physics department, a position he held for 12 years. “During his time
as chair, he had, essentially, three full-time jobs,” says colleague
Cyrus Taylor: “chairing the department, running his research group, and
his role in, essentially, public education of science.” Krauss has been
a leading popular science writer and speaker since “The Physics of Star
Trek” was published in 1995. His 2001 book “Atom” follows a single
oxygen atom from the Big Bang into the distant future, while 2005’s
“Hiding in the Mirror” looks skeptically at the idea that extra
dimensions exist.
“One of the things we really lack in this
country is a well-known popular intellectual who speaks for science,”
says Brown University biology professor Kenneth Miller, who has
collaborated with Krauss. The late authors Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay
Gould used to have that stature. “One reason Lawrence’s work and books
are so important is they help to fill that void.”
In early 2002, Krauss felt compelled to speak louder. The Ohio State
Board of Education was talking about rewriting science lessons to
question evolution, the central idea of modern biology. The hot new
challenge to evolution was “intelligent design,” which argues that life
is too complex for science to explain and must have been designed by a
higher intelligence.
Though Krauss is a physicist, not a biologist, he felt evolution’s
critics were really attacking scientific thought by arguing (as Krauss
describes it) that “the scientific method is not appropriate until God
is part of the equation.” So that winter, he and Miller debated two
intelligent-design advocates at a forum the school board organized in
Columbus. “Devil Worshippers Go Home,” read a protest sign Krauss
passed on the way in.
“This panel looks fair — two against two — but
it is not fair,” Krauss told the crowd of 1,500. “If it were
representative, you would have 10,000 scientists debating one
intelligent-design advocate.”
When the school board endorsed “critical
analysis of evolution,” scientists howled. Krauss’ point about fairness
hadn’t sunk in. A 2002 Plain Dealer poll showed 59 percent of Ohioans
wanted both intelligent design and evolution included in science
classes.
“It’s unfair to children to present a lie, [this] myth that evolution
is controversial and suspect, and isn’t adequate as a scientific
theory,” Krauss says. So he wrote op-ed pieces for papers from The
Plain Dealer to The New York Times and advised lawyers for parents in
Dover, Pa., who were challenging intelligent design in federal court.
When the judge ruled that intelligent design is a religious view that
doesn’t belong in science classrooms, Krauss warned Gov. Bob Taft and
the state school board that Ohio risked a lawsuit if it didn’t drop
“critical analysis of evolution.” The board reversed its decision last
February.
Next, Krauss and other local scientists formed
Help Ohio Public Education to campaign against the board’s
evolution-challengers. They especially wanted to defeat board member
Deborah Owens Fink, a University of Akron marketing professor. They
made an appointment with Tom Sawyer, the former congressman and Akron
mayor, and asked him to run against her.
“Lawrence was the cleanup hitter,” says Sawyer.
“When they got done, he said, ‘You have to run.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t,’
and Lawrence leaned forward and said, ‘Oh, yes, you do.’ ” They needed
an experienced campaigner to jump into the race, they told Sawyer.
Krauss “has a very special kind of charisma,”
Sawyer says. “He’s able to relate to people where he meets them.”
Sawyer soon announced his candidacy. Krauss convinced scientists
nationwide to contribute to Sawyer’s campaign, wrote an Akron Beacon
Journal op-ed piece criticizing Owens Fink, and got 75 of Case’s 90
science professors to sign a letter asking voters to boot her out of
office.
Sawyer crushed Owens Fink by almost a 2-1
margin. Three other candidates Krauss’ group endorsed won too.
“He’s a very brilliant man, a very passionate
person and very arrogant,” says Owens Fink. “He would dismiss people
who didn’t agree with him as politically motivated, advocating a
particular agenda, rather than talking about the science of it. The
reality is, he’s very politically motivated in his agenda.” Krauss is
an outspoken liberal, she complains, pointing to his membership in the
anti-global-warming Union of Concerned Scientists and the Campaign to
Defend the Constitution, which opposes the religious right on science
education, end-of-life questions and stem-cell research.
Scientists, meanwhile, admire Krauss for
standing up for evolution. “The leadership role he’s taken on has
engendered enormous respect for him,” says Taylor, his Case physics
colleague.
Activism is easy for Krauss when he has his
peers’ support. Campus politics were more intimidating.
Last February, Krauss sat staring at his
computer screen, rereading the e-mail he’d written, searching for the
nerve to hit “send.”
His message called for Case’s arts and sciences faculty to hold a vote
of no confidence in Case’s president, Ed Hundert, and its provost, John
Anderson.
“It probably was the most difficult thing I’ve
almost ever done,” Krauss says. “I had no idea if this was going to
completely fail, and if it was going to burn every bridge I had at the
institution.”
Hundert had come to Case in 2002 from the
University of Rochester, full of inspiring ideas for improving the
school. He wanted it to do more of everything: Attract more students
and more star professors, increase research, renovate the campus, and
pay for it all by running a deficit that’d be paid off with more
government research money and more alumni donations. Four years later,
though, fund-raising was faltering, the deficit was increasing to $40
million, and faculty members were complaining the administration was
withholding too much financial information.
Krauss felt the Hundert administration’s priorities were all wrong.
“You’ve got to recruit great faculty,” he says. Instead, he argues,
administrators seemed preoccupied with “slogans and public-relations
tricks.” On fund-raising, meanwhile, “We were doing a disastrous job.
We were alienating alumni.”
Case’s “rebranding” efforts, meant to project a
catchier identity, had backfired. When the school started calling
itself Case instead of the awkward acronym CWRU, many alumni of Western
Reserve University, still touchy about its 1969 merger with the Case
Institute of Technology, stopped sending donations. When the university
debuted a new logo made up of two vertical lines and two horizontal
ones, students joked it looked like a fat man carrying a surfboard.
For months, as the budget numbers got worse,
Case professors had been talking. What should they do?
Krauss thought much of his Case legacy was at
stake. He’d come to the school from Yale, recruited by the aging
physics faculty to take over as their chairman.
“He was largely responsible for rebuilding the
department,” says physics colleague Glenn Starkman. Krauss recruited
first-rate new professors, tripled the number of physics grad students
and built up the particle physics program into one of the most
prominent in the world. He was so successful that some professors
elsewhere at Case became jealous, even distrustful: Why should physics
get so much?
But more recently, Krauss had grown frustrated
with Case’s direction. He’d chaired a panel that recommended improving
graduate education and research. Its ideas had basically gone nowhere.
Another faction, who advocated improving undergraduate education, was
winning the day; Krauss felt parts of that strategy were a “marketing
ploy.”
Projects Krauss held dear were suffering. The
university was cutting funding for his astrophysics and cosmology
research and for hiring physics professors. The budget crisis was
threatening to undo years of his work.
Krauss hit “send,” and his e-mail popped into
inboxes across campus. Within 12 hours, he got twice as many
professors’ signatures as he needed to schedule the no-confidence vote.
Word got out to local and national newspapers. Ten days later, the arts
and sciences professors voted 131-44 to declare they no longer had
confidence in Hundert, and 97-68 to say the same about the provost.
Two weeks later, Hundert resigned. “The
continuing tension on campus is too distracting to the advancement of
our university,” he wrote in an e-mail.
Some Case staffers are still upset at Krauss and
his allies for chasing Hundert away. Grover Gilmore, dean of the Mandel
School of Applied Social Sciences, thinks the no-confidence vote
“turned into more of a show,” attracted too much media attention and
negativity about the school’s health, and derailed Hundert’s own
attempts to fix the budget problems. “The undergrads I talked to were
really sad to see Dr. Hundert resign,” says Gilmore. “They liked him.
They thought he did a lot for the students on campus.”
Hundert could not be reached for comment for
this story. Anderson, who is still provost, says the administration was
already confronting the budget problems before Hundert left — for
instance, by reorganizing the budget office the previous fall. He says
the vote did not change Case’s strategy for improving its finances.
“I think we would have proceeded in basically
the same way,” Anderson says. The vote did have one positive result, he
adds: “One thing we learned was we needed better communication with the
faculty and staff.” As for Krauss, Anderson says, “He did what he felt
he needed to do. I have to respect his actions.”
Krauss’ friend Cyrus Taylor says Hundert needed
to leave for the school to reverse its troubles. “Ed projected a
fantastic vision, and in the long run his legacy at Case will be
positive,” he says, “but the mode we were entering in — financial
difficulties — was one that did not play to his strengths.” Taylor
thinks someone else would have organized a vote if Krauss hadn’t and
that Hundert would have eventually been forced to resign anyway,
perhaps after things had gotten even worse.
After Hundert left, interim president Gregory
Eastwood pushed through a painful round of budget cuts and layoffs.
Some deans resigned, and new deans took over. Now, Case is recovering
fine from its leadership crisis, faculty members say. A well-regarded
new president, Barbara Snyder, now the provost and executive vice
president of The Ohio State University, will take over in July. It’ll
take a while for the school to climb out of its deficit, but faculty
members say the new administration is much more open with information
and on track toward improving its finances. Undergraduate admissions
were strong this year.
“The general sense is we’re going to come
roaring back,” says Taylor, who was recently named the new dean of arts
and sciences.
Far from hurting Krauss’ reputation on campus, leading the faculty
revolt seems to have helped his stature. “Because I’ve had a high
profile, I think there were a lot of faculty who probably didn’t trust
my motives,” he says. Now, he thinks many of them “at least have more
trust in me, and maybe even like me.” Some professors who thought
Krauss’ success advocating for physics came at the expense of other
departments were impressed, explains Starkman, when he articulated what
they were thinking about Case’s leadership.
Challenging authority was nothing new for Krauss.
Krauss was staking out a FedEx box on Case’s campus, waiting for the
driver to show. He held two packages, hoping to substitute them for two
in the box. One address read: “His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, 00120
Vatican City.”
Two months earlier, in May 2005, Krauss had
written an op-ed piece for The New York Times about how science and
religion can be compatible. As an example, he used Pope John Paul II’s
statements that accepted evolution as scientific fact, coexisting with
the church’s belief that the universe has a divine purpose.
Then, in July, the archbishop of Vienna,
Christoph Schönborn, wrote his own New York Times op-ed. “Evolution in
the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the
neo-Darwinian sense — an unguided, unplanned process of random
variation and natural selection — is not,” it read.
The cardinal also argued that there was
“overwhelming evidence for design in biology.” That sounded to Krauss
like an endorsement of intelligent design. A New York Times reporter
soon called Krauss and said the Discovery Institute’s
intelligent-design advocates had sent Schönborn a copy of Krauss’ piece
and gotten the cardinal to write a response.
Krauss had to do something. “I thought it was
vitally important not to take a giant step backward,” he says. If
Schönborn’s idea became Catholic doctrine, it would roll back decades
of progress in dialogue between science and religion.
So he decided to write to the new pope.
Krauss isn’t Catholic — he’s Jewish and
agnostic. But that didn’t stop him.
He looked into the etiquette of writing the
pope, everything from how to greet him (“Holy Father” if you’re
Catholic, “His Holiness” if you’re not) to where to send a letter
(Krauss addressed one package directly to the Vatican, another to the
Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith — which, he notes with a wry
unbeliever’s faux-nervousness, was formerly the Inquisition). He wrote
the first draft and got two Catholic biologists — including Kenneth
Miller, who had debated the intelligent-design advocates with him in
Columbus — to join the letter and help revise it.
But when Krauss’ secretary put the letter in
international express packages, she didn’t include the two op-eds that
had started the debate. So Krauss put together new packages and staked
out the FedEx box to make the switch.
The 6 p.m. pick-up time came and went. Krauss
waited. Finally, around 7:15, the FedEx truck pulled up.
Krauss asked to switch the packages. It was really important, he said:
He was writing to the pope about evolution, The New York Times was
about to run a story ...
The delivery man started asking questions. He
was a creationist and believed the Earth was less than 10,000 years
old.
Krauss got nervous. He asked him to deliver the package anyway. The
delivery man told him not to worry. “I take my job very seriously,” he
said.
A couple of days later, Krauss got a call from
the FedEx office in Rome. “We have a package for a Pope Benedict in the
Vatican,” the worker said. “We can’t find this person.”
Krauss said he’d buy some shares in FedEx, and
then announce that the company couldn’t find the pope in the Vatican.
The guy laughed.
FedEx kept calling, for the pope’s street address, then his phone
number, then to say the Vatican had refused delivery. Sending packages
directly to the pope, it turned out, was not the proper etiquette.
Fortunately, Krauss had also e-mailed the pope.
“This letter was extremely well done,” says
George Coyne, director emeritus of the Vatican Observatory, one of the
oldest astronomical institutes in the world. “My impression is it
helped. The church has stepped back from making any declaration on
this, which is wise.”
That fall, the Vatican’s newspaper ran a respected Catholic biologist’s
article saying intelligent design was not science. Schönborn himself
backed off somewhat. “I see no problem combining belief in the Creator
with the theory of evolution, under one condition — that the limits of
a scientific theory are respected,” he said in an October 2005 lecture
in Vienna. The cardinal said his real argument was with those who want
to say God played no part in creating the universe.
Not every cosmologist corresponds with Pope Benedict. Why Krauss?
“It’s a fun exercise,” he shrugs. “It’s fun to
write the pope.” Then he turns more serious. The fact that The New York
Times will print his opinions makes him something of a “public
intellectual,” he says. That carries responsibilities. “I’m fortunate
to have a voice that can be heard,” he says — and he felt he should use
it.
Lately, though, some scientists have been making
the exact argument Schönborn warned against: That scientific reason
supports atheism and refutes the existence of God. That’s put Krauss in
a strange position, as a sort of agnostic defender of faith.
This fall, Krauss reviewed famed evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins’ new book “The God Delusion” in the journal
Nature. “This book is, for the most part, a well-referenced sermon,”
Krauss wrote. “I just have no idea who the intended parishioners might
be.”
Krauss’ views and Dawkins’ are actually pretty
similar. “From all my studies of science and everything I know about
human history, I certainly see no evidence for any creator,” Krauss
says. But he found the book heavy-handed, condescending (“I felt
Richard was offending even people who agreed with him”) and
unscientific. Dawkins “claims to give a scientific argument against
God, and I didn’t find it particularly compelling.” Metaphysical
arguments about God aren’t science, Krauss says.
“Lawrence has really been quite outspoken on the
point that science is not inherently antireligious,” says Brown’s
Kenneth Miller. “It is a testament to his fierce intellectual honesty
that he has consistently pointed out that there are questions that
science cannot answer.”
In November, Krauss argued with antireligious scientists at the Beyond
Belief conference in La Jolla, Calif. Over dinner, he and Dawkins spent
hours debating and are now writing a dialogue for Scientific American.
He says he and Dawkins agreed on a few things, mostly that religious
skeptics are too defensive, treating religious arguments with kid
gloves.
“Are we too polite, too afraid to argue that not
believing in God might be a good thing?” Krauss asks. “Many problems in
the world today are due to the fact that people don’t question their
beliefs. … If belief in God disappeared from the scene,it’d be very
difficult to believe you’re divinely right — that you have God on your
side when you slam into a building.
Full of antsy energy, Krauss
paces across the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s auditorium
stage. He’s looking semicasual but authoritative, wearing a brown sport
coat over a subtly striped shirt, no tie, and pants with a braided belt.
He starts his speech with a quick aside about his activism. “I will be
talking about doomsday in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday,” he says.
Krauss recently joined the board of directors of the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, who have been warning for decades about the dangers
of nuclear war, and who have recently added a new worldwide threat to
their agenda: global warming.
That’s why Krauss slipped that greenhouse-effect reference into his
Orchestra introduction. At a recent Bulletin meeting, he learned that
scientists’ best indicators show the Earth is 10 years away from a
point of no return. If we act now to reduce our carbon emissions, we
can stop the rise in global temperatures by about one degree — but if
current trends continue, climate change will be unstoppable, he says:
“We’ll have a different planet.”
Today, though, Krauss is here to talk about his area of greatest
expertise: the universe. His PowerPoint throws an old photo of a giant
telescope onto the screen behind him. At the foot of the telescope
stands a distinguished-looking man, peering into the eyepiece, smoking
a pipe. He “gives me inspiration and hope, which I often need lately,”
Krauss says. The man is Edwin Hubble, the namesake of NASA’s orbiting
Hubble Space Telescope, and the astronomer who discovered in 1929 that
there are other galaxies besides ours, and they are all moving away
from each other.
Our knowledge of the universe has grown, Krauss says, from Hubble’s
discovery in 1929 to new breakthroughs of just a few years ago —
breakthroughs in which Krauss himself has played a part.
After Hubble, he says, “The central question in cosmology became,
what’s the future going to be? Is everything going to keep expanding
and moving apart, and the universe becoming cold and dark? Or is it
going to collapse in a fiery reversal of the Big Bang? Are we going to
end in fire or ice?”
That, he says, is why he got into cosmology. “I wanted to be the first
to know how the universe would end.”
For the next hour, Krauss describes the greatest breakthroughs
astronomers have achieved since Hubble’s day. They’ve used supernovae —
exploding stars of immense brightness — as “standard candles” to
measure how far away the supernovae’s galaxies are. Then they used
those distances to triangulate the speed of galaxies, which led them to
discover the age of the universe: “13 1/2 billion years old — except in
Ohio, Alabama, Georgia and a few other places,” he jokes. Around 1995,
they essentially weighed the universe, calculating the mass of galaxy
superclusters by measuring how they bend the light behind them. And in
1998, scientists at the South Pole mapped cosmic microwave background
radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang.
The results scrambled everyone’s ideas about the universe. The
galaxy-cluster calculations revealed that “most of the mass of the
universe doesn’t shine,” Krauss says. “It’s dark matter.” They also
suggested that the universe had only 30 percent of the mass needed to
make the universe closed — that is, likely to collapse someday. But the
microwave radiation evidence suggested that the universe was flat, the
midpoint between an open and closed universe. The contradiction led
cosmologists to a mind-boggling conclusion: There’s energy in empty
space — dark energy, scientists call it.
“This will win the Nobel Prize. It shocked everyone,” Krauss says. “The
biggest energy in the universe comes from nothing, comes from empty
space, and it’s causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.”
That may seem nonsensical, but the theories of relativity and quantum
mechanics say it’s possible, he says. So the old rules about how the
universe behaves are gone. “The whole reason I got into cosmology,
which was to determine the end of the universe by measuring the total
amount of matter there was? Out the window.”
Instead, Krauss has contributed to the changes in cosmology. He was one
of the few who wrote about the possibility that dark energy existed
before the convincing evidence was calculated in the mid-1990s — one of
the things that made Krauss a leader in his field.
Krauss tells the crowd that the implications of a rapidly expanding
universe are dire, in the very long run. If the expansion is speeding
up, he says, other galaxies will eventually move away from us faster
than the speed of light — which is allowed in general relativity. A
hundred billion years from now, when astronomers look through their
telescopes, “the rest of the universe will have disappeared.” That
means “life must end,” Krauss says. Those isolated astronomers will be
stranded, without energy or escape, when their own star burns out — an
end in ice, not fire.
Krauss’ own future, though, looks as bright as a
young star. “What I’m looking for is a bigger platform to have an
impact around the world in the areas I’m working in.” That might be at
Case, or it might be elsewhere. He’s talking about founding an
organization called the Origins Institute involving Case and University
Circle museums. It’d combine physics, astronomy, geology, genetics and
psychology to “explore the origins of the universe, the solar system,
human cognition and genetic origins.”
Every year, says Krauss’ friend Cyrus Taylor, “stellar institutions
around the country and internationally have tried to lure him away.”
With Case’s budget problems not totally solved yet, Krauss is listening
more seriously this year.
“There are various other possibilities,” Krauss says, “from leading a
research institute, or maybe [staying] at Vanderbilt, or an
administrative position, from dean to vice president for research at
various universities.” Krauss says he’s happy with Case’s new president
and new deans, but he’s waiting to see how much Case can afford to
contribute to his projects. “The key question is, has the university
been so hampered that my own activities will be constrained enough for
the near future that I really can’t function effectively?”
Krauss’ career and fame may be growing, yet his own outlook for the
country and world’s future is tinged with disillusionment. And
cosmology’s outlook, seen one way, is darker still. In his work, Krauss
is confronted, more than the rest of us, with the fact that the sun
will die someday, that life on Earth will die with it, that the latest
theory forecasts the universe ending in frozen darkness.
Yet to Krauss, the knowledge of the universe’s fate and our tiny place
in it isn’t depressing — it’s fascinating, even inspiring.
“The fact we’re insignificant does not make us any less remarkable,”
Krauss says. “It may make us more remarkable. The fact that we’re here
is such an amazing accident. The fact that we have this brief moment in
the sun means we should make the most of it. The fact that we’re
conscious and aware beings, and the universe largely doesn’t have that,
is such a special opportunity that we should make the most of our
minds.”
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