Ingenious: Lawrence M. Krauss
Cosmologist and communicator
By Michael Segal
Originally published at Nautilus on October 22, 2015.
Lawrence Krauss is a rare animal.
He is a physicist with landmark results under his belt, including the prediction that most of the universe’s energy is stored in free space. He is the author of nine popular books (soon to be 10), including the best-selling The Physics of Star Trek (where I learned that the Enterprise would need to burn 81 times its entire mass in fuel to accelerate to half light-speed).
Krauss is also not one to mince words. Whether it’s on the topic of philosophy (“physics needs philosophy but not philosophers”) or religion (he ran an article in The New Yorker last month with the title “All scientists should be militant atheists”), he is outspoken and occasionally controversial.
That he enjoys a direct or irreverent comment clearly comes through in conversation. But more important to him is his love of science, and his view of the scientific method not just as a practical tool, but as a cultural value that needs to be disseminated and defended, controversy or not.
He spoke to Nautilus from his home in Oregon.
