The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything

by K. C. Cole

Overview

“A compelling, enjoyable, and widely accessible exploration of one of the most fundamental scientific issues of our age” (Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe).
 
In The Hole in the Universe, an award-winning science writer “provides an illuminating slant on physics and mathematics by exploring the concept of nothing” (Scientific American).
 
Welcome to the world of cutting-edge math, physics, and neuroscience, where the search for the ultimate vacuum, the point of nothingness, the ground zero of theory, has rendered the universe deep, rich, and juicy. Every time scientists and mathematicians think they have reached the ultimate void, something new appears: a black hole, an undulating string, an additional dimension of space or time, repulsive anti-gravity, universes that breed like bunnies. Cole’s exploration at the edge of everything is “as playfully entertaining as it is informative” (San Jose Mercury News).
 
“A strong and sometimes mind-blowing introduction to the edges of modern physics.” —Salon.com
 
“Comprising an expansive set of topics from the history of numbers to string theory, the big bang, even Zen, the book’s chapters are broken into bite-sized portions that allow the author to revel in the puns and awkwardness that comes with trying to describe a concept that no one has fully grasped. It is an amorphous, flowing, mind-bending discussion, written in rich, graceful prose. As clear and accessible as Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this work deserves wide circulation, not just among science buffs.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
“Here we have the definitive book about nothing, and who would think that nothing could be so interesting . . . not only accessible but compelling reading.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544079557
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

A popular science columnist for the Los Angeles Times and teacher at UCLA, K. C. Cole is a recipient of the 1995 American Institute of Physics Award for Best Science Writing. She is also the author of the internationally-bestselling The Universe and the Teacup, First You Build a Cloud, and The Hole in the Universe. Cole lives in Santa Monica, California.

Read an Excerpt

Why Not? A Prelude
Nothing is too wonderful to be true.
(Michael Faraday
there is a hole in the universe.
It is not like a hole in a wall where a mouse slips through, solid and crisp and leading from somewhere to someplace. It is rather like a hole in the heart, an amorphous and edgeless void. It is a heartfelt absence, a blank space where something is missing, a large and obvious blind spot in our understanding of the universe.

The paper is bumpy so that any mark you draw on it skips and sputters from place to place, and you find that it's impossible to draw a perfectly smooth line.
Or the paper is slippery, so that your pen slides and the ink oozes off the edge.
Or the paper is curled into a cylinder, so that even a straight line circles around and meets itself from the rear.
Or the paper is black—so anything you draw on it disappears.
Or the paper is three-dimensional, like a cardboard box: suddenly you have many more possibilities for what you can create.
Or the paper is one-dimensional, like a line: your possibilities are constricted.
Or the paper has zero dimensions, or ten, and they are knotted and twisted in bizarre ways.
Or the paper wiggles and waves as you try to write on it. It won't stand still.
Or the paper has a barely perceivable background, an intricate set of images that you couldn't see until you developed the right technology.
Or the paper grows, stretches, shrinks, changes shape before your eyes.
Or the paper itself starts to draw lines and figures of its own accord.
Sweet Nothing

Anybody who knows all about nothing knows everything.
—physicist Leonard Susskind, Stanford University

From our earliest days, we've grown accustomed to thinking of nothing as a kind of bland absence—a convenient pause between numbers or atoms or thoughts, a passive-aggressive empty space that resembles nothing so much as a blank stare.

*See Chapter 3, "Good for Nothing."

What People are Saying About This

Oliver Sacks

Going from black holes and false vacua to blind spots and phantoms, K.C. Cole, with her wide-ranging mind, has provided a deep (but also light-hearted and accessible) meditation on "nothingness"--and how cosmologists, physicists, neurologists, psychologists, artists (and mystics) all find the notion of it productive and indispensable.
— (Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of The Island of the Colorblind)

Dava Sobel

An extraordinary book. K.C. Cole is our ambassador to the realms of the exceedingly strange, inside the atom and outside the known universe. She is a practical philosopher with the singular ability to graze eleven dimensions of esoteric material, find the connections among them, and see the humor in it all.
— (Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter)

Brian Greene

With grace, humor, and abundant skill, K.C. Cole takes the reader on a grand and lively tour of modern physics--from cosmology, to particle physics, to string theory--and shows how all roads ultimately lead to the same question: what is "nothing"? The Hole in the Universe is a compelling, enjoyable, and widely accessible exploration of what may well be the most fundamental scientific issue of our age.
— (Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe)

Interviews

Exclusive Author Essay
Physicist Frank Oppenheimer used to say that artists and scientists were the official "noticers" of society. Their job was to notice things that other people either had never been taught to see or had learned to ignore -- then to go out and tell the world about what they'd found.

I realize now that this is precisely what I've become: an official noticer. I get paid to be the ultimate voyeur. I peer over scientists' shoulders as they build machines of almost unfathomable proportions that re-create -- albeit on a small scale -- the creation of the universe. I eavesdrop as they struggle to find the unifying principles of nature in ten-dimensional space. I hang out in laboratories and lecture halls where scientists try to decode the messages written on the walls of the universe or streaming from the deep throats of black holes.

I certainly didn't start out as someone who was interested in science. I wanted to understand the way the world works. And I thought the way to do that was to study the social sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science. Like most people with an interest in human affairs, I never gave much of a thought to math or physics -- fields that seemed to have little to do with the kinds of things that interested me.

One of the reasons, of course, was that most of the science I learned in school was crammed into rigid boxes labeled geometry, biology, physics -- as if they have nothing to do with each other, much less with human experience. It was science stripped of all the wonderful ambiguity that pervades the real practice of science: the wrong answers; the right answers to the wrong questions. Most of all, it didn't reflect the role -- the critical role -- that our understanding of the physical universe plays in shaping our emotional and philosophical one.

I first started making these connections in a series of "Hers" columns for The New York Times. These grew into my first science book: First You Build a Cloud: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life. It explores what hard science has to say about quasi-philosophical questions such as the nature of right and wrong, cause and effect, aesthetics, disorder, and the use and abuse of metaphor.

The next book, similarly, grew mostly from articles I had written for The Los Angeles Times that linked mathematics with everything from the O. J. Simpson trial to fairness in divorce settlements. It is called The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty, and it's a celebration of mathematics as a singular set of rules for seeing the truth.

The subsequent book is perhaps less obviously philosophical. Yet The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything (you can see I have a fondness for long subtitles) also links physics, mathematics and perception in an exploration of the invisible forces that shape everything. We only call them "nothings" because we aren't aware of their existence. But they hold up the universe just the same. Like physics and philosophy, something and nothing are two sides of the same coin.

--K. C. Cole

Editorial Reviews

Acclaimed science writer K. C. Cole, author of The Universe and the Teacup and First You Build a Cloud, takes on the void. An L.A. Times bestseller, The Hole in the Universe examines "nothing," from vacuums and zero to black holes and phantom limbs.

bn.com

...a quirky, contemplative and immensely stimulating rumination on Nothing.
— San Francisco Chronicle

David Perlman

The vacuum is attracting physicists' attention lately...now Los Angeles Times science writer Cole ventures upon the void, fortunately with a sensitivity well pitched to the level of complexity average readers can absorb. She explains that absence of stuff doesn't define a vacuum, since 'Empty' space is filled with fields--evanescent particle pairs that flash in and out of existence--and, further, that space-time itself is 'something.'...Cole regularly reassures us that the theory-bred conjectural properties of nothingness she describes seem weird to her, too, and at the same time she clearly conveys why they thrill physicists: they could account for why the big bang began or why physical constants have the values they have...An enthusiastic, companionable guide to the inner limits of the universe.
— Booklist

Gilbert Taylor

...the book is a strong and sometimes mind-blowing introduction to the edges of modern physics.
— Salon

Michael Scott Moore

In Hole in the Universe, science journalist and author Cole explains why the scientific search for nothingness is attracting so much attention among physicists. Scientists and theories are probed in this survey of the history of the search for the 'ultimate nothingness' of the universe, yet the account is most accessible to lay audiences.

PRAISE FOR THE HOLE IN THE UNIVERSE
As clear and accessible as Hawking's A Brief History of Time, this work deserves wide circulation, not just among science buffs."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Cole has plenty of experience making the most abstruse theories intelligible to the lay reader. . . . A clever and readable investigation."-New York Post

From the Publisher