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Praise for The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far 
"In every debate I've done with theologians and religious believers, their 
knock-out final argument always comes in the form of two questions: 
Why is there something rather than nothing? and Why are we here? The 
presumption is that if science provides no answers then there must be a 
God. But God or no, we still want answers. In A Universe from Nothing 
Lawrence Krauss, one of the biggest thinkers of our time, addressed the 
first question with verve, and in The Greatest Story Ever Told he tackles 
the second with elegance. Both volumes should be placed in hotel rooms 
across America, in the drawer next to the Gideon Bible 
—Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, columnist for 
Scientific American, and author of The Moral Arc 
"Discovering the bedrock nature of physical reality ranks as one of 
humanity's greatest collective achievements. This book gives a fine 
account of the main ideas and how they emerged. Krauss is himself 
close to the field and can offer insights into the personalities who have 
led the key advances. A practiced and skilled writer, he succeeds in 
making the physics 'as simple as possible but no simpler: I don't know a 
better book on this subject? 
—Martin Rees, author of Just Six Numbers 
"It is an exhilarating experience to be led through this fascinating story, 
from Galileo to the Standard Model and the Higgs boson and beyond, 
with lucid detail and insight, illuminating vividly not only the achieve-
ments themselves but also the joy of creative thought and discovery, 
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enriched with vignettes of the remarkable individuals who paved the 
way. It amply demonstrates that the discovery that 'nature really follows 
the simple and elegant rules intuited by the twentieth- and twenty-first-
century versions of Plato's philosopher? is one of the most astonishing 
achievements of the human intellect." 
—Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of 
Linguistics (emeritus), MIT 
"Charming ... Krauss has written an account with sweep and verve that 
shows the full development of our ideas about the makeup of the world 
around us.... A great romp." 
—Walter Gilbert, Nobel laureate in chemistry 
1 loved the fight scenes and the sex scenes were excellent." 
—Eric Idle 
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ALSO BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS 
A Universe from Nothing 
The Fifth Essence 
Fear of Physics 
The Physics of Star Trek 
Beyond Star Trek 
Hiding in the Mirror 
Quintessence 
Atom 
Quantum Man 
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1 
1._ 11. 1,, 
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THE GREATEST 
STORY EVER 
TOLD-SO FAR 
WHY ARE WE HERE? 
Lawrence M. Krauss 
ATRIA BOOKS 
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ATRIA BOOKS 
An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 
1230 Avenue of the Americas 
New York, NY 10020 
Copyright 0 2017 by Lawrence Krauss 
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof 
in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights 
Department. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. 
First Atria Books hardcover edition March 2017 
ATRIA BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon 
& Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or 
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For 
more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers 
Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at 
Interior design by Dana Sloan 
Manufactured in the United States of America 
109 8 7 6 543 2 1 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
ISBN 978-1-4767-7761-0 
ISBN 978-1-4767-7763-4 (ebook) 
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For Nancy 
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06 PM 
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These are the tears of things, 
and the stuff of our mortality 
cuts us to the heart. 
—VIRGIL 
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CONTENTS 
Prologue 
1 
Part One: Genesis 
Chapter 1: From the Armoire to the Cave 
9 
Chapter 2: Seeing in the Dark 
19 
Chapter 3: Through a Glass, Lightly 
33 
Chapter 4: There, and Back Again 
45 
Chapter S: A Stitch in Time 
55 
Chapter 6: The Shadows of Reality 
71 
Chapter?: A Universe Stranger than Fiction 
83 
Chapter 8: A Wrinkle in Time 
97 
Chapter 9: Decay and Rubble 
113 
Chapter 10: From Here to Infinity: Shedding Light on the Sun 
125 
Part Two: Exodus 
Chapter 11: Desperate Times and Desperate Measures 
Chapter 12: March of the Titans 
Chapter 13: Endless Forms Most Beautiful: Symmetry 
Strikes Back 
xl 
139 
151 
167 
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xi' 
CONTENTS 
Chapter 14: Cold, Stark Reality: Breaking Bad or Beautiful? 
181 
Chapter 15: Living inside a Superconductor 
191 
Chapter 16: The Bearable Heaviness of Being: Symmetry 
Broken, Physics Fixed 
201 
Part Three: Revelation 
Chapter 17 The Wrong Place at the Right Time 
211 
Chapter 18: The Fog Lifts 
219 
Chapter 19: Free at Last 
231 
Chapter 2O: Spanking the Vacuum 
249 
Chapter 21: Gothic Cathedrals of the Twenty-First Century 
259 
Chapter 22: More Questions than Answers 
275 
Chapter 23: From a Beer Party to the End of Time 
289 
Epilogue: 
Cosmic Humility 
301 
Acknowledgments 
307 
Index 
309 
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PROLOGUE 
The hardest thing of all to see Is what Is really there. 
-J. A. BAKER, THE PEREGRINE 
L the beginning there was light. 
But more than this, there was gravity. 
After that, all hell broke loose.... 
This is how the story of the greatest intellectual adventure in history 
might properly be introduced. It is a story of science's quest to uncover the 
hidden realities underlying the world of our experience, which required 
marshaling the very pinnacle of human creativity and intellectual bravery 
on an unparalleled global scale. This process would not have been possible 
without a willingness to dispense with all kinds of beliefs and preconcep-
tions and dogma, scientific and otherwise. The story is filled with drama 
and surprise. It spans the full arc of human history, and most remarkably, 
the current version isn't even the final one—just another working draft. 
It's a story that deserves to be shared far more broadly. Already in the 
first world, parts of this story are helping to slowly replace the myths 
and superstitions that more ignorant societies found solace in centuries 
or millennia ago. Nevertheless, thanks to the directors George Stevens 
and David Lean, the Judeo-Christian Bible is still sometimes referred 
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2 
PROLOGUE 
to as "the greatest story ever told." This characterization is astounding 
because, even allowing for the frequent sex and violence, and a bit of 
poetry in the Psalms, the Bible as a piece of literature arguably does not 
compare well to the equally racy but less violent Greek and Roman epics 
such as the Aeneid or the Odyssey-even if the English translation of the 
Bible has served as a model for many subsequent books. Either way, as 
a guide for understanding the world, the Bible is pathetically inconsis-
tent and outdated. And one might legitimately argue that as a guide for 
human behavior large swaths of it border on the obscene. 
In science, the very word sacred is profane. No ideas, religious or 
otherwise, get a free pass. For this reason the pinnacle of the human 
story did not conclude with a prophet's sacrifice two thousand years 
ago, any more than it did with the death of another prophet six hundred 
years later. The story of our origins and our future is a tale that keeps on 
telling. And the story is getting more interesting all the time, not due to 
revelation, but due to the steady march of scientific discovery. 
Contrary to many popular perceptions, this scientific story also en-
compasses both poetry and a deep spirituality. But this spirituality has 
the additional virtue of being tied to the real world—and not created in 
large part to appease our hopes and dreams. 
The lessons of our exploration into the unknown, led not by our de-
sires, but by the force of experiment, are humbling. Five hundred years 
of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced igno-
rance. By this standard, what cosmic arrogance lies at the heart of the 
assertion that the universe was created so that we could exist? What 
myopia lies at the heart of the assumption that the universe of our expe-
rience is characteristic of the universe throughout all of time and space? 
This anthropocentrism has fallen by the wayside as a result of the 
story of science. What replaces it? Have we lost something in the pro-
cess, or as I shall argue, have we gained something even greater? 
I once said at a public event that the business of science is to make 
people uncomfortable. I briefly regretted the remark because I worried 
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PROLOGUE 
3 
that it would scare people away. But being uncomfortable is a virtue, not 
a hindrance. Everything about our evolutionary history has primed our 
minds to be comfortable with concepts that helped us survive, such as 
the natural teleological tendency children have to assume objects exist 
to serve a goal, and the broader tendency to anthropomorphize, to as-
sign agency to lifeless objects, because clearly it is better to mistake an 
inert object for a threat than a threat for an inert object. 
Evolution didn't prepare our minds to appreciate long or short time-
scales or short or huge distances that we cannot experience directly. So 
it is no wonder that some of the remarkable discoveries of the scientific 
method, such as evolution and quantum mechanics, are nonintuitive at 
best, and can draw most of us well outside our myopic comfort zone. 
This is also what makes the greatest story ever told so worth telling. The 
best stories challenge us. They cause us to see ourselves differently, to re-
align our picture of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. This is not only 
true for the greatest literature, music, and art. It is true of science as well. 
In this sense it is unfortunate that replacing ancient beliefs with modern 
scientific enlightenment is often described as a "loss of faith." How much 
greater is the story our children will be able to tell than the story we have 
told? Surely that is the greatest contribution of science to civilization: to 
ensure that the greatest books are not those of the past, but of the future. 
Every epic story has a moral. In ours, we find that letting the cosmos 
guide our minds through empirical discovery can produce a great rich-
ness of spirit that harnesses the best of what humanity has to offer. It 
can give us hope for the future by allowing us to enter it with our eyes 
open and with the necessary tools to actively participate in it. 
• 
• 
• 
My previous book, A Universe from Nothing, described how the revolu-
tionary discoveries over the past hundred years have changed the way we 
understand our evolving universe on its largest scales. This change has led 
science to begin to directly address the question Why is there something 
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4 
PROLOGUE 
rather than nothing?"—which was formerly religious territory—and re-
work it into something less solipsistic and operationally more useful. 
Like A Universe from Nothing, this story also originated in a lecture I 
presented, in this case at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, 
which generated some excitement at the time, and as a result I was once 
again driven to elaborate upon the ideas I started to develop there. In con-
trast to A Universe from Nothing, in this book I explore the other end of the 
spectrum of our knowledge and its equally powerful implications for under-
standing age-old questions. The profound changes over the past hundred 
years in the way we understand nature at its smallest scales are allowing us 
to similarly co-opt the equally fundamental question Why are we here?" 
We will find that reality is not what we think it is. Under the surface 
are "weird: counterintuitive, invisible inner workings that can chal-
lenge our preconceptions of what makes sense as much as a universe 
arising from nothing might. 
And like the conclusion I drew in my last book, the ultimate lesson 
from the story I will tell here is that there is no obvious plan or purpose to 
the world we find ourselves living in. Our existence was not preordained, 
but appears to be a curious accident. We teeter on a precarious ledge with 
the ultimate balance determined by phenomena that lie well beneath the 
surface of our experience—phenomena that don't rely in any way upon 
our existence. In this sense, Einstein was wrong: "God" does appear to 
play dice with the universe, or universes. So far we have been lucky. But 
like playing at the craps table, our luck may not last forever. 
• 
• 
• 
Humanity took a major step toward modernity when it dawned in our 
ancestors' consciousness that there is more to the universe than meets 
the eye. This realization was probably not accidental. We appear to be 
hardwired to need a narrative that transcends and makes sense of our 
own existence, a need that was probably intimately related to the rise of 
religious belief in early human societies. 
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PROLOGUE 
5 
By contrast, the story of the rise of modern science and its divergence 
from superstition is the tale of how the hidden realities of nature were 
uncovered by reason and experiment through a process in which seem-
ingly disparate, strange, and sometimes threatening phenomena were 
ultimately understood to be connected just beneath the visible surface. 
Ultimately these connections dispelled the goblins and fairies that had 
earlier spawned among our ancestors. 
The discovery of connections between otherwise seemingly dispa-
rate phenomena is, more than any other single indicator, the hallmark 
of progress in science. The many classic examples include Newton's 
connection of the orbit of the Moon to a falling apple; Galileo's recogni-
tion that vastly different observed behaviors for falling objects obscure 
that they are actually attracted to the earth's surface at the same rate; 
and Darwin's epic realization that the diversity of life on Earth could 
arise from a single progenitor by the simple process of natural selection. 
None of these connections was all that obvious, at first. However, after 
the relationship comes to light and becomes clear, it prompts an "Ahar 
experience of understanding and familiarity. One feels like saying, 1 
should have thought of that!" 
Our modern picture of nature at its most fundamental scale—the 
Standard Model, as it has become called—contains an embarrassment 
of riches, connections that are far removed from the realm of everyday 
experience. So far removed that it is impossible without some ground-
ing to make the leap in one step to visualize them. 
Not surprisingly, such a single leap never occurred historically, ei-
ther. A series of remarkable and unexpected and seemingly unrelated 
connections emerged to form the coherent picture we now have. The 
mathematical architecture that has resulted is so ornate that it almost 
seems arbitrary. "Ahar is usually the furthest thing from the lips of the 
noninitiated when they hear about the Higgs boson or Grand Unifica-
tion of the forces of nature. 
To move beyond the surface layers of reality, we need a story that 
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6 
PROLOGUE 
connects the world we know with the deepest corners of the invisible 
world all around us. We cannot understand that hidden world with in-
tuitions based solely on direct sensation. That is the story I want to tell 
here. I will take you on a journey to the heart of those mysteries that 
lie at the edge of our understanding of space, time, and the forces that 
operate within them. My goal is not to unnecessarily provoke or offend, 
but to prod you, just as we physicists ourselves have been prodded and 
dragged by new discoveries into a new reality that is at once both un-
comfortable and uplifting. 
Our most recent discoveries about nature's fundamental scales have 
chillingly altered our perception of the inevitability of our presence in 
the universe. They provide evidence too that the future will no doubt be 
radically different from what we might otherwise have imagined, and 
they too further decrease our cosmic significance. 
We might prefer to deny this uncomfortable, inconvenient reality, 
this impersonal, apparently random universe, but if we view it in an-
other context, all of this need not be depressing. A universe without 
purpose, which is the way it is as far as I can tell, is far more exciting 
than one designed just for us because it means that the possibilities of 
existence are so much more diverse and far ranging. How invigorating 
it is to find ourselves with an exotic menagerie to explore, with laws and 
phenomena that previously seemed beyond our wildest dreams, and to 
attempt to untangle the knotted confusion of experience and to search 
for some sense of order beneath. And how fascinating it is to discover 
that order, and to piece together a coherent picture of the universe on 
scales far beyond those that we may ever directly experience—a picture 
woven together by our ability to predict what will happen next, and the 
consequent ability to control the environment around us. How lucky 
to have our brief moment in the Sun. Every day that we discover some-
thing new and surprising, the story gets even better. 
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