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back to the drawing board, except if we don't see any new signals at the 
LHC, we will have little guidance about which direction to head in order 
to derive a model of nature that might actually be correct. 
Things got more interesting when the LHC reported a tantalizing pos-
sible signal due to a new particle about six times heavier than the Higgs 
particle. This particle did not have the characteristics one would expect 
for any supersymmetric partner of ordinary matter. In general the most 
exciting spurious hints of signals go away when more data are amassed, 
and about six months after this signal first appeared, after more data were 
amassed, it disappeared. If it had not, it could have changed everything 
about the way we think about Grand Unified Theories and electroweak 
symmetry, suggesting instead a new fundamental force and a new set of 
particles that feel this force. But while it generated many hopeful theoreti-
cal papers, nature seems to have chosen otherwise. 
The absence of clear experimental direction or confirmation of super-
symmetry has thus far not bothered one group of theoretical physicists. 
The beautiful mathematical aspects of supersymmetry encouraged, in 
2984, the resurrection of an idea that had been dormant since the 196os 
when Nambu and others tried to understand the strong force as if it were 
a theory of quarks connected by stringlike excitations. When supersym-
metry was incorporated in a quantum theory of strings, to create what 
became known as superstring theory, some amazingly beautiful math-
ematical results began to emerge, including the possibility of unifying 
not just the three nongravitational forces, but all four known forces in 
nature into a single consistent quantum field theory. 
However, the theory requires a host of new space-time dimensions to 
exist, none of which has been, as yet, observed. Also, the theory makes 
no other predictions that are yet testable with currently conceived ex-
periments. And the theory has recently gotten a lot more complicated 
so that it now seems that strings themselves are probably not even the 
central dynamical variables in the theory. 
None of this dampened the enthusiasm of a hard core of dedicated 
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and highly talented physicists who have continued to work on super-
string theory, now called M-theory, over the thirty years since its heyday 
in the mid-398os. Great successes are periodically claimed, but so far 
M-theory lacks the key element that makes the Standard Model such 
a triumph of the scientific enterprise: the ability to make contact with 
the world we can measure, resolve otherwise inexplicable puzzles, and 
provide fundamental explanations of how our world has arisen as it has. 
This doesn't mean M-theory isn't right, but at this point it is mostly 
speculation, although well-meaning and well-motivated speculation. 
Here is not the place to review the history, challenges, and successes 
of string theory. I have done that elsewhere, as have a number of my col-
leagues. It is worth remembering that if the lessons of history are any 
guide, most forefront physical ideas are wrong. If they weren't, anyone 
could do theoretical physics. It took several centuries or, if one counts 
back to the science of the Greeks, several millennia of hits and misses to 
come up with the Standard Model. 
So this is where we are. Are great new experimental insights just 
around the corner that may validate, or invalidate, some of the grander 
speculations of theoretical physicists? Or are we on the verge of a desert 
where nature will give us no hint of what direction to search in to probe 
deeper into the underlying nature of the cosmos? We'll find out, and we 
will have to live with the new reality either way. 
No matter what curveballs nature may throw at us, the recent dis-
covery of the Higgs, the latest and one of the greatest experimental and 
theoretical achievements of the remarkable Standard Model of particle 
physics, has beautifully capped more than two millennia of intellectual 
effort by brave and determined philosophers, mathematicians, and sci-
entists to uncover the hidden tapestry that underlies our existence. 
It also suggests that the beautiful universe in which we find ourselves 
may not only resemble, at least metaphorically, an ice crystal on a win-
dowpane, it may be almost as ephemeral. 
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Chapter 23 
FROM A BEER PARTY TO 
THE END OF TIME 
For the fashion of this world passeth away. 
-1 CORINTHIANS 7:31 
My own research focus for much of my career has been 
the emerging field of cosmology called particle astrophysics. Following 
the flood of theoretical developments of the 296os and 197os, it was dif-
ficult for terrestrial experiments, limited as they are by our abilities to 
build complex machines such as particle accelerators, to keep up. As a 
result, a number of us turned to the universe for guidance. Since the Big 
Bang implies that the early universe was hot and dense, conditions ex-
isted then that we might never achieve in laboratories on Earth. But if 
we are clever, we can look for remnant signatures of those early times 
out in the cosmos, and we may be able test our ideas about even the 
most esoteric aspects of fundamental physics. 
My previous book, A Universe from Nothing, described the revolu-
tions in our understanding of the evolution of the universe on large 
scales, and over long times. Not only have our explorations revealed the 
existence of dark matter, which, as I have described, is likely composed 
of new elementary particles not yet observed in accelerators—although 
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we may be on the cusp of doing so—but far more exotic still, we have 
discovered that the dominant energy of the universe resides in empty 
space—and we currently have no idea how it arises. 
Our observations have now taken us back to the neonatal universe. 
We have observed the fine details of radiation, called the cosmic micro-
wave background, which emanates from a time when the universe was 
merely three hundred thousand years old. Our telescopes take us back 
to the earliest galaxies, which formed perhaps a billion years after the 
Big Bang, and have allowed us to map huge cosmic structures contain-
ing thousands of galaxies and spanning hundreds of millions of light-
years across, sprinkled amid the hundred trillion or so galaxies in the 
visible universe. 
To explain these features, theorists rely on an idea that arose due to 
the development of Grand Unified theories. In 1981, Alan Guth realized 
that the symmetry-breaking transition that might occur at the GUT 
scale early in the universe might not be identical to the transition that 
breaks the symmetry between the weak interaction and electromag-
netism. In the GUT case, the Higgs-like field that condenses in space 
to break the GUT symmetry between the strong force and the elec-
troweak force might momentarily get stuck in a metastable high-energy 
state before relaxing to its final configuration. While it was in this "false 
vacuum" configuration, the field would store energy that would be re-
leased when the field ultimately relaxed to its preferred lowest-energy 
configuration. 
The situation would not be unlike what may have happened to you 
if you have ever planned a big party and then forgotten to put the beer 
in the fridge in time. You then put the beer in the freezer and forget 
about it during the party. The next day you discover the beer, open a 
bottle, and wham! The beer in the bottle suddenly freezes and expands, 
shattering the glass, and producing quite a mess. Before the top is taken 
off, the beer is under high pressure, and the beer at this pressure and 
temperature is liquid. However, once you open the top and release the 
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pressure, the beer suddenly freezes. During the transition, energy is re-
leased as the beer relaxes to its new state—enough energy to cause the 
expanding ice to break the bottle. 
Now imagine a similar situation when you are in a cold climate. On 
a brisk and rainy winter day, the temperature may quickly drop below 
freezing, causing the rain to change to snow. Puddles of water on the 
street may not freeze right away, especially if the tires of passing cars are 
continually agitating them. Later in the day, when the traffic dies down, 
the water may suddenly freeze, causing dangerous black ice on the road. 
Due to the previous agitation by cars and the quick fall in temperature, 
the water got stuck in a `metastable phase," namely as a liquid. Eventu-
ally, however, a phase transition takes place, and the black ice forms. 
Because at these low temperatures the preferred, lowest-energy state of 
water is its solid form, when the liquid freezes, it releases the excess en-
ergy it stored in its metastable liquid state. 
Guth wondered what would have happened in the early universe if 
such a behavior occurred during a Grand Unified Theory transition—if 
whatever scalar field that acts like the Higgs field for that transition re-
mains in its original (symmetry-preserving) ground state for a brief time, 
even as the universe cools past the point where the new (symmetry-
breaking) ground state condensate becomes preferred. Guth realized 
that this type of energy, stored through space by this field before the 
transition completes, would be gravitationally repulsive. As a result, it 
would cause the universe to expand—potentially by a huge factor, maybe 
twenty-five orders of magnitude or more in scale—in a microscopically 
short time. 
He next discovered that this period of rapid expansion, which he 
dubbed inflation, could resolve a number of existing paradoxes associ-
ated with the Big Bang picture, including why the universe is so uni-
form on large scales and why three-dimensional space on large scales 
appears so close to being geometrically flat. Both of these seem inexpli-
cable without inflation. The first problem is solved because, during the 
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rapid expansion, any initial inhomogeneities get smoothed out, just as a 
wrinkled balloon gets smoothed out when it gets blown up. Pushing the 
balloon analogy further, the surface of a balloon that is blown up to be 
very large, say, the size of Earth, could look very flat, just as Kansas does. 
While this provides two-dimensional intuition, the same phenomenon 
would apply to the three-dimensional curvature of space itself. After 
inflation, space would appear to be flat—namely it would be like the 
universe most of us had assumed we live in already, where parallel lines 
never intersect and the x, y, and z axes point the same direction every-
where in the universe. 
After inflation ends, the energy stored in the false vacuum state 
throughout space would be released, producing particles and reheating 
the universe to a high temperature, setting up a natural and realistic 
initial condition for the subsequent standard hot Big Bang expansion. 
Even better, a year after Guth proposed his picture, a number of 
groups performed calculations of what would happen to particles and 
fields as the universe rapidly expanded during inflation. They discov-
ered that small inhomogeneities resulting from quantum effects at early 
times would then be "frozen in" during inflation. After inflation ended, 
these small inhomogeneities could grow to produce galaxies, stars, 
planets, etc., and would also leave an imprint in the cosmic microwave 
background (CMB) radiation that resembles precisely the pattern that 
has since been measured. However, it is also possible, by using different 
inflationary models, to get different predictions for the CMB anisotro-
pies (inflation is, at this point, more of a model than a theory, and since 
no unique Grand Unified Theory transition is determined by experi-
ment, many different variants might work). 
Another exciting and more unambiguous prediction from inflation 
exists. During the period of rapid expansion, ripples in space, called 
gravitational waves, would be produced. These ripples would produce 
another characteristic signature in the CMB that might be sought out. 
In 2014, the BICEP experiment claimed to detect a signal that was iden-
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tical to what was predicted. This caused incredible excitement in both 
theoretical and observational communities. Along with Frank Wilczek, 
I wrote a paper that not only pointed out that such an observation 
would indicate a symmetry-breaking scale that corresponded nicely to 
the Grand Unified Theory symmetry-breaking scale in models with su-
persymmetry, but also that the observation would demonstrate unam-
biguously that gravity had to be a quantum theory on small scales—so 
that a search for a quantum theory of gravity was not misplaced. 
Unfortunately, however, the BICEP announcement proved to be pre-
mature. Other backgrounds in our galaxy could have produced a similar 
signal, and as of this writing the situation still seems murky, with no 
unambiguous confirmation of inflation, or quantum gravity. 
Most recently, between completion of the first draft of this book 
and completion of the final draft, the first definitive direct discovery of 
gravitational waves was made by an amazing set of detectors, called the 
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), located 
in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. LIGO is a spec-
tacular and ambitious machine. To detect gravitational waves emitted 
by colliding black holes in distant galaxies, the experimenters had to 
be able to detect an (oscillating) difference in length between two four-
kilometer-long perpendicular arms of the detectors equivalent to one 
one-thousandth of the size of a proton—like measuring the distance 
between Earth and the nearest star other than our Sun, Alpha Centauri, 
to an accuracy of the width of a human hair! 
As amazing as the LIGO discovery of gravitational waves is, the 
waves it detected are from a distant astrophysical collision, not from the 
earliest moments of the Big Bang. But the success of LIGO will herald 
the building of new detectors, so that gravitational-wave astronomy will 
likely become the astronomy of the twenty-first century. 
If the successors to LIGO, or BICEP, in this or the next century are 
able to measure directly the signature of gravitational waves from infla-
tion, it will give us a direct window on the physics of the universe when 
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it was less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of 
a second old. It will allow us to directly test our ideas of inflation, and 
even Grand Unification, and perhaps even shed light on the possible 
existence of other universes—turning what is now metaphysics into 
physics. 
For the moment, however, inflation is merely a well-motivated 
proposal that seems to naturally resolve most of the major puzzles 
in cosmology. But while inflation remains the only first-principles 
theoretical-candidate explanation for the major observational fea-
tures of our universe, it relies on the existence of a new and com-
pletely ad hoc scalar field—invented solely to help produce inflation 
and fine-tuned to initiate it as the early universe first began to cool 
down after the Big Bang. 
Before the discovery of the Higgs particle, this speculation was 
plausible at best. With no example of any fundamental scalar field yet 
known, the assumption that Grand Unified symmetry-breaking might 
result from yet another simple Higgs-like mechanism was an extrapola-
tion that rested on an insecure footing. As I have described, the break-
ing of electroweak symmetry was clear with the discovery of W and Z 
particles. But the simple Higgs field could have been a fairy-tale place-
holder for some far more complicated, and perhaps far more interesting, 
underlying mechanism. 
Things have now changed. The Higgs exists, and so too apparently 
a background scalar field permeating all space in the universe today, 
giving mass to particles and producing the characteristics of a universe 
we can inhabit. If a Grand Unified Theory really exists combining all 
three forces into one at close to the beginning of time, some symmetry-
breaking must have then occurred so that the three known nongravi-
tational forces would only begin to diverge in character afterward. The 
Higgs demonstrates that symmetry-breaking in the laws of nature can 
occur as the result of a scalar field condensate throughout space. De-
pending upon the details, inflation thus becomes a far more natural and 
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potentially generic possibility. As my colleague Michael Turner put it 
jokingly some time ago, aping then Federal Reserve Board chair Alan 
Greenspan, "Periods of inflation are inevitable!" 
That statement may have been more prescient than anyone imagined 
at the time. In 1998 it was discovered that our universe is now under-
going a new version of inflation, validating some previous and rather 
heretical predictions by a few of us. As I mentioned earlier, this implies 
that the dominant energy of the universe now appears to reside in empty 
space—which is the most plausible explanation of why the observed ex-
pansion of the universe is speeding up. The Nobel Prize was awarded 
to Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess, and Saul Perlmutter for the discovery 
of this remarkable and largely unexpected phenomenon. Naturally the 
questions arise, What could be causing this current accelerated expan-
sion, and What is the source of this new kind of energy? 
Two possibilities present themselves. First, it could be a fundamental 
property of empty space, a possibility actually presaged by Albert Ein-
stein shortly after he developed the General Theory of Relativity, which 
he realized could accommodate something he called a "cosmological 
constant," but which we now realize could simply represent a nonzero 
ground-state energy of the universe that will exist indefinitely into the 
future. 
Or second, it could be energy stored in yet another invisible back-
ground scalar field in the universe. If this is the case, then the next ob-
vious question is, Will this energy be released in yet another, future 
inflationary-like phase transition as the universe continues to cool 
down? 
At this time the answer is up for grabs. While the inferred energy 
density of empty space is today greater than the energy density of every-
thing else we see in the universe, in absolute terms, on the scale of the 
energies associated with the masses of all elementary particles we know 
of, it is minuscule in the extreme. No one has any sensible first-principles 
explanation using known particle physics mechanisms for how the 
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ground-state energy of the universe could be nonzero—resulting in Ein-
stein's cosmological constant—and yet so small as to allow the kind of 
gentle acceleration we are now experiencing. (One plausible explanation 
does exist—first due to Steve Weinberg—though it is speculative and re-
lies on speculative ideas about possible physics well beyond the realm of 
anything we currently understand. If there are many universes, and the 
energy density in empty space, assuming it is a cosmological constant, 
is not fixed by fundamental physics constraints, but instead randomly 
varies from universe to universe, then only in those universes in which 
the energy in empty space is not much bigger than the value we measure 
would galaxies be able to form, and then would stars be able to form, 
and only then planets, and only then astronomers ...) 
Meanwhile, no one has a sensible model for a new phase transition 
predicted to occur in particle physics for a new scalar field that would 
store such a small amount of energy in space today. By sensible, I mean 
a model that anyone other than those who propose it finds plausible. 
Nevertheless, the universe is the way it is, and the fact that current 
fundamental theory does not make a first-principles prediction that ex-
plains something as fundamental as the energy of empty space implies 
nothing mystical. As I have said, lack of understanding is not evidence 
for God. It is merely evidence of a lack of understanding. 
Given that we do not know the source of the inferred energy in 
empty space, we are free to hope for the best, and in this case perhaps 
that means hoping that the cosmological constant explanation is cor-
rect rather than its being due to some as yet undiscovered scalar field 
that may one day relax into a new state, releasing the energy currently 
stored in space. 
Recall that because of the coupling of the Higgs field to the rest of the 
matter in the universe, when the field condensed into its electroweak 
symmetry-breaking state, the properties of matter and the forces that 
govern the interactions of matter changed dramatically. 
Now, if some similar phase transition involving some new scalar field 
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in space is yet to occur in nature, then the stability of matter as we 
know it could disappear. Galaxies, stars, planets, people, politicians, and 
everything we now see could literally disappear. The only good news 
(other than the disappearance of politicians) is that the transition—
assuming it begins with some small seed in one location of our universe 
(in the same way that small dust grains may help seed the formation of 
the ice crystals on our frozen windowpane, or of snowflakes as they fall 
to the ground)—will then spread throughout space at the speed of light. 
We won't know what hit us until after it has, and after it has, we won't 
be around to know. 
The curious reader may have noticed that all of these discussions 
relate to new possible scalar fields in nature. What about the Standard 
Model Higgs field? Could it play a role in all of these current cosmic 
shenanigans? Could the Higgs field store energy and be responsible for 
inflation either in the early universe or now? Could the Higgs field not 
be in its final ground state, and will there be another transition that will 
once again change the configuration of the electroweak force, and the 
masses of particles in the Standard Model? 
Good questions. And the answers to all of them are the same: we 
don't know. 
That has not stopped a number of theorists from speculating about 
this possibility. My favorite example—not because it is better than any of 
the others, but because it's a speculation I made with a colleague, James 
Dent, shortly after the Higgs was discovered—is that perhaps the Higgs 
does play a role in the observed cosmic expansion. As a number of au-
thors have recognized, the existence of one background field condensate 
and the particles it comprises can provide a unique window, or `portal," 
that may yield otherwise unexpected sensitivity to the existence of other 
Higgs-like fields in nature, no matter how weakly their direct couplings to 
the particles we observe in the Standard Model may be. 
If the Higgs and other Higgs-like particles exist, perhaps at the 
Grand Unified Theory scale, the physical Higgs, the particle that was 
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discovered at CERN, may be a slight admixture between the weak in-
teraction Higgs, and another Higgs-like particle. (In this we are guided 
by the physics of neutrinos, where similar phenomena play a vital role 
in understanding the behavior of neutrinos measured on Earth coming 
from the nuclear reactions in the Sun, for example.) It is then possible, 
at least, to argue that when the weak interaction Higgs field condenses 
in empty space, this could stimulate the condensation of another Higgs-
like field with properties that would allow it to store just the right energy 
to explain the observed inflation of the universe today. The mathematics 
required to make this happen is pretty contrived—the model is ugly. 
But who knows? Maybe it is ugly because we haven't found the correct 
framework in which to embed it. 
However, one attractive feature of this scenario makes it a little less 
self-serving to mention it. In this picture, the energy carried by the second 
field, which would drive the current measured accelerated expansion of 
the universe today, will likely ultimately be released in a new phase transi-
tion to the true ground state of the universe. Unlike many other possibili-
ties for future possible phase transitions in our universe, because the new 
field can be weakly coupled to all observed particles, this transition will 
not induce a change in the observed properties of any of the known par-
ticles in nature by an amount that would be noticeable. The upshot is that 
if this model is right, the universe as we know it may survive. 
Yet celebration may be premature. Independent of such speculations, 
the discovery of the Higgs particle has raised the specter of a much less 
optimistic possibility. While a future in which the observed accelera-
tion of the universe goes on forever is a miserable future for life and for 
the ability to continue to probe the universe—because eventually all 
galaxies we can now observe will recede from us faster than light, ulti-
mately disappearing from our horizon, leaving the universe cold, dark, 
and largely empty—the future that may result because of a Higgs field 
with a mass its times the mass of the proton could be far worse. 
For a Higgs mass coinciding with the allowed range of the observed 
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Higgs, assuming for the moment that the Standard Model is not supple-
mented by a lot of new stuff at higher energy, calculations suggest that 
the existing Higgs field condensate is teetering on the edge of instabil-
ity—it could change from its current value to a vastly different value 
associated with a lower-energy state. 
If such a transition occurs, normal matter as we know it changes its 
form, and galaxies, stars, planets, and people most likely disappear, like 
the ice crystal on a warm sunny morning. 
For those who enjoy horror stories, another, even more gruesome 
possibility has been suggested. An instability might exist that would 
cause the Higgs field to continue to grow in magnitude indefinitely. As 
a result of such growth, the energy stored by the evolving Higgs field 
could become negative. This could cause the entire universe to collapse 
once again in a cataclysmic reversal of the Big Bang—a Big Crunch. 
Happily the data disfavor such a possibility, as poetic as it might seem. 
In the scenario in which everything we now see disappears as the 
Higgs makes a sudden transition to a new ground state, I want to stress 
that the Higgs mass, as now measured, favors stability but has sufficient 
uncertainty in its value to fall on either side of this line—either pro-
ducing the apparently stable vacuum that we are now flourishing in, or 
favoring such a transition. Moreover, this scenario is based on calcula-
tions within the Standard Model alone. Any new physics that might 
be discovered at the LHC or beyond could change the picture entirely, 
stabilizing what could otherwise be an unstable Higgs field. Since we 
are reasonably certain there is new physics to be discovered, there is no 
cause for despair at present. 
If that isn't consolation enough, for those who still fear that the ulti-
mate future of the universe might be the more miserable one I have just 
described, the same calculations that suggest this may happen also sug-
gest that our current metastable configuration of reality would persist 
for not merely billions of years into the future, but billions of billions of 
billions of years. 
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Concerns about the future notwithstanding, now is an appropriate 
time to once again emphasize that the universe doesn't give a damn 
what we would like or whether we survive. Its dynamics continue in-
dependently of whether we exist or not. For this reason I am strangely 
attracted to the doomsday scenario I have just described. In this case, 
the remarkable accident that is responsible for our existence—the con-
densation of a field that allows the current stability of matter, atoms, 
and life itself—is seen as a short-term bit of good luck. 
The imaginary scientists living on the spine of an ice crystal on the 
windowpane that I described earlier would first discover that one direc-
tion in their universe was particularly special (which would no doubt be 
celebrated by the theologians in such a society as an example of God's 
love). Digging deeper, they might discover that this special circum-
stance is just an accident and that other ice crystals can exist in which 
other directions are favored. 
And so, we too have discovered that our universe, with its forces and 
particles and amazing Standard Model that results in the remarkable 
good fortune of an expanding universe with stars and planets and life 
that can evolve a consciousness, is also a simple accident made possible 
because the Higgs field condensed in just the way it did as the universe 
evolved early on. 
And even as the imaginary scientists on the hypothetical ice crystal 
might celebrate their discoveries as we are wont to do, they might also 
be unaware that the Sun is about to rise and that soon their ice crystal 
will melt, and all traces of their brief existence will disappear. Would 
this have made the thrill of their brief existence less enthralling? Cer-
tainly not. If our future is similarly fleeting, we can at least enjoy the 
wild ride we have taken and relish every aspect of the greatest story ever 
told ... so far. 
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Epilogue 
COSMIC HUMILITY 
For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. 
-GENESIS 3:19 
if 
These are the tears of things, and the stuff of our mortal-
ity cuts us to the heart:' 
So said Virgil as he penned the first great epic story of the classical era. 
They are the words I chose to use as the epigraph of this book because the 
story I wanted to tell not only contains every bit as much drama, human 
tragedy, and exaltation, but it is ultimately motivated by a similar purpose. 
Why do we do science? Surely it is in part so that we can have greater 
control of our environment. By understanding the universe better we 
can predict the future with greater accuracy, and we can build devices 
that might change the future—hopefully for the better. 
But ultimately I believe we are driven to do science because of a pri-
mal urge we have to better understand our origins, our mortality, and 
ultimately ourselves. We are hardwired to survive by solving puzzles, 
and that evolutionary advantage has, over time, allowed us the luxury 
of wanting to solve puzzles of all sorts—even those less pressing than 
how to find food or to escape from a lion. What puzzle is more seductive 
than the puzzle of our universe? 
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Humanity didn't have a choice in its evolution. We find ourselves 
alive on a planet that is 46 billion years old in a galaxy that is 12 billion 
years old, in a 23.8-billion-year-old universe with perhaps a trillion gal-
axies that is expanding ever faster into a future we cannot yet predict. 
So what do we do with this information? Is there special significance 
here for understanding our human story? In the midst of this cosmic 
grandeur and tragedy, how can we reconcile our own existence? 
For most people, the central questions of existence ultimately come 
down to transcendental ones: Why is there a universe at all? Why are 
we here? 
Whatever presumptions one might bring to the question "Why?," if 
we understand the "how" better, "why" will come into sharper focus. I 
wrote my last book to address what science has to say about the first of 
the above questions. The story I have related here provides what I think 
is the best answer to the second. 
Faced with the mystery of our existence, we have two choices. We 
can assume we have special significance and that somehow the universe 
was made for us. For many, this is the most comfortable choice. It was 
the choice made by early human tribes, who anthropomorphized nature 
because it provided them some hope of understanding what otherwise 
seemed to be a hostile world often centered on suffering and death. It is 
the choice made by almost all the world's religions, each of which has its 
own claimed solution to the quandary of existence. 
This choice of which tale to embrace has led to one culture's sacred 
book, the New Testament, which has sometimes been called "the great-
est story ever told"—the story of that civilization's putative discovery 
of its own divinity. Yet when I witness wars and killing based on which 
prayers we are supposed to recite, which persons we are supposed to 
marry, or which prophet is the appropriate one to follow, I cannot help 
but be reminded, once again, of Gulliver, who discovered societies war-
ring over which way God had intended man to break an egg. 
The second choice when addressing these transcendental mysteries 
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is to make no assumption in advance about the answer. Which leads to 
another story. One that I think is more humble. In this story we evolve 
in a universe whose laws exist independently of our own being. In this 
story we check the details to see if they might be wrong. In this story we 
are going to be surprised at every turn. 
The story I have written here describes a human drama as much as 
a universal one. It describes the boldest intellectual quest humans have 
ever undertaken. It even has scriptural allegories, for those who prefer 
them. We wandered in the desert for forty years after the development 
of the Standard Model before we discovered the Promised Land. The 
truth, or at least as much of the truth as we now know, was revealed to 
us in what for most people seems to be incomprehensible scribbles: the 
mathematics of gauge theories. These have not been delivered to us on 
golden tablets by an angel, but rather by much more practical means: 
on pieces of paper in laboratory notebooks filled through the hard work 
of a legion of individuals who knew that their claims could be tested by 
whether they correctly modeled the real world, the world of observation 
and experiment. But as significant as the manner by which we got here 
is that we have gotten this far. 
At this point in the story, what can we conclude about why we are 
here? The answer seems all the more remarkable because it reveals ex-
plicitly just how deeply the universe of our experience is a shadow of 
reality. 
I also began this book with a quote from the naturalist J. A. Baker, 
from The Peregrine: "The hardest thing of all to see is what is really 
there." I did so because the story I have told is the most profound ex-
ample of this wise observation that I know of. 
I next described Plato's Allegory of the Cave because I know of no 
better or more lyrical representation of the actual history of science. 
The triumph of human existence has been to escape the chains that our 
limited senses have imposed upon us. To intuit that beneath the world 
of our experience lies a reality that is often far stranger. It is a real-
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THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD-SO FAR 
ity whose mathematical beauty may be unimpeachable, but a reality in 
which our existence becomes—more than we might ever have imagined 
in advance—a mere afterthought. 
If we now ask why things are the way they are, the best answer we 
can suggest is that it is the result of an accident in the history of the 
universe in which a field froze in empty space in a certain way. When 
we ponder what significance that might have, we might equally pon-
der what is the significance of that specific ice crystal seen in the early-
morning frost on a windowpane. The rules that allowed us to come into 
being seem no more worth fighting and dying for than it would seem to 
be to fight and die to resolve whether "up" in the ice-crystal universe is 
better than "down," or whether it is better to crack an egg from the top 
or the bottom. 
Our primitive ancestors survived in large part because they recog-
nized that nature could be hostile and violent, even as it was remarkable. 
The progress of science has made it clear just how violent and hostile the 
universe can be for life. But recognizing this does not make the universe 
less amazing. Such a universe has ample room for awe, wonder, and ex-
citement. If anything, recognition of these facts gives us greater reason 
to celebrate our origins, and our survival. 
To argue that, in a universe in which there seems to be no purpose, 
our existence is itself without meaning or value is unparalleled solip-
sism, as it suggests that without us the universe is worthless. The great-
est gift that science can give us is to allow us to overcome our need to 
be the center of existence even as we learn to appreciate the wonder of 
the accident we are privileged to witness. 
Light played a major role in our story, as it did in Plato's allegory. Our 
changing perception of light led us to a changing understanding of the 
essence of space and time. Ultimately that changing perception made it 
clear that even this messenger of reality that is so essential to us and our 
existence is itself merely a fortunate consequence of a cosmic accident. 
An accident that may someday be rectified. 
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It is appropriate here to recognize that the line in the Aeneid that 
follows the epigraph with which this book began was the hopeful cry 
"Release your fear." A future that might bring about our end does not 
negate the majesty of the journey we are still taking. 
The story I have told is not the whole story. There is likely to be far 
more that we don't understand than what we now do. In the search for 
meaning, our understanding of reality will surely change as the story 
continues to unfold. I am often told that science can never do some 
things. Well, how do we know until we try? 
As fate would have it, I am writing these final words while sitting at 
the desk at which my late friend and coconspirator in the battle against 
myth and superstition Christopher Hitchens wrote his masterpiece, God 
Is Not Great. It is hard not to feel his presence channeling these words, 
even as I know he would be the first to remind me that such feelings 
arise from inside my head, and not from anything more cosmically sig-
nificant. Yet the title of his book emphasizes that human stories, which 
he loved so dearly and described so brilliantly, pale in comparison to the 
story that nature has driven us to discover. And so the human stories 
about God also pale in comparison to the real "greatest story ever told." 
This story ultimately does not give the past special significance. We 
can reflect upon and even celebrate the road we have taken, but the 
greatest liberation, and the greatest solace that science provides, come 
from perhaps its greatest lesson: that the best parts of the story can yet 
be written. 
Surely this possibility makes the cosmic drama of our existence 
worthwhile. 
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