Upon investigating allegations about sexual misconduct by Krauss, ASU determined that Krauss had violated university policy, and did not renew his Origins Project directorship for a third term in July 2018.[3][4] Krauss retired as a professor at ASU in May 2019, at the end of the following academic year. He currently serves as president of The Origins Project Foundation.[5] Krauss hosts The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss[6] and publishes a blog titled Critical Mass.[7]
After some time in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Krauss became an assistant professor at Yale University in 1985 and associate professor in 1988. He left Yale for Case Western Reserve University in 1993 when he was named the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, professor of astronomy, and chairman of the physics department until 2005. In 2006, Krauss led the initiative for the no-confidence vote against Case Western Reserve University's president Edward M. Hundert and provost John L. Anderson by the College of Arts and Sciences faculty. On March 2, 2006, both no-confidence votes were carried: 131–44 against Hundert and 97–68 against Anderson.[11]
In August 2008, Krauss joined the faculty at Arizona State University as a foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at the Department of Physics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He also became the director of the Origins Project, a university initiative "created to explore humankind's most fundamental questions about our origins".[12][13] In 2009, he helped inaugurate this initiative at the Origins Symposium, in which eighty scientists participated and three thousand people attended.[14]
Donors to the Origins Project included a foundation called "Enhanced Education", run by the financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Krauss appears in the media both at home and abroad to facilitate public outreach in science. He has also written editorials for The New York Times. As a result of his appearance in 2002 before the state school board of Ohio, his opposition to intelligent design has gained national prominence.[15]
Krauss attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief symposia in November 2006 and October 2008. He served on the science policy committee for Barack Obama's first (2008) presidential campaign and, also in 2008, was named co-president of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In 2010, he was elected to the board of directors of the Federation of American Scientists, and in June 2011, he joined the professoriate of the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.[16] In 2013, he accepted a part-time professorship at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the physics department of the Australian National University.[17]
Krauss is a critic of string theory, which he discusses in his 2005 book Hiding in the Mirror.[18] In his 2012 book A Universe from Nothing Krauss says about string theory "we still have no idea if this remarkable theoretical edifice actually has anything to do with the real world".[19][20] Released in March 2011, another book titled Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, while A Universe from Nothing—with an afterword by Richard Dawkins—was released in January 2012, and became a New York Times bestseller within a week. Originally, its foreword was to have been written by Christopher Hitchens, but Hitchens grew too ill to complete it.[21][22] The paperback version of the book appeared in January 2013 with a new question-and-answer section and a preface integrating the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. On March 21, 2017, his newest book, The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far: Why Are We Here? was released in hardcover, paperback, and audio version.
A July 2012 article in Newsweek, written by Krauss, indicates how the Higgs particle is related to our understanding of the Big Bang. He also wrote a longer piece in The New York Times explaining the science behind and significance of the particle.[23]
In January 2019, Krauss became President of the Origins Project Foundation,[24] a non-profit corporation intended to host public panel discussions on science, culture, and social issues.[25] On June 21, 2019, a new video podcast, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, launched with Krauss as host.[6] The first episodes included dialogues with Ricky Gervais, Noam Chomsky, and Jenny Boylan.
Krauss mostly works in theoretical physics and has published research on a variety of topics within that field. In 1995 he proposed that the energy-density of the universe was dominated by the energy of empty space.[26] In 1998 this prediction was confirmed by two observational collaborations and in 2011 the Nobel Prize was awarded for their discovery. Krauss has formulated a model in which the Universe could have potentially come from "nothing", as outlined in his 2012 book A Universe from Nothing. He explains that certain arrangements of relativistic quantum fields might explain the existence of the Universe as we know it while disclaiming that he "has no idea if the notion [of taking quantum mechanics for granted] can be usefully dispensed with".[27] As his model appears to agree with experimental observations of the Universe (such as its shape and energy density), it is referred to by some as a "plausible hypothesis".[28][29] His model has been criticized by cosmologist and theologian George Ellis,[30] who said it "is not tested science" but "philosophical speculation".
Initially, Krauss was skeptical of the existence of the Higgs boson.[31] However, after it was detected by CERN, he researched the implications of the Higgs field on the nature of dark energy.[32]
Krauss has argued that public policy debates in the United States should have a greater focus on science.[33][34][35][36] He criticized Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson's statements on science, writing that Carson's remarks "suggest he never learned or chooses to ignore basic, well-tested scientific concepts".[37][38]
Krauss has described himself as an antitheist[39] and takes part in public debates on religion. Krauss is featured in the 2013 documentary The Unbelievers, in which he and Richard Dawkins travel across the globe speaking publicly about the importance of science and reason as opposed to religion and superstition.[40] He has participated in many debates with religious apologists, including William Lane Craig[41] and John Lennox.[42]
In his book A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing (2012), Krauss discusses the premise that something cannot come from nothing, which has often been used as an argument for the existence of a prime mover. He has since argued in a debate with John Ellis and Don Cupitt that the laws of physics allow for the Universe to be created from nothing. "What would be the characteristics of a universe that was created from nothing, just with the laws of physics and without any supernatural shenanigans? The characteristics of the universe would be precisely those of the ones we live in."[43] In an interview with The Atlantic, however, he states that he has never claimed that "questions about origins are over". According to Krauss, "I don't ever claim to resolve that infinite regress of why-why-why-why-why; as far as I'm concerned it's turtles all the way down".[44]
Krauss defended Epstein after his 2008 guilty plea of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18. In 2011, Krauss told an interviewer, "As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people...I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it."[47][48]
Harvard Professor Steven Pinker said that Krauss was one of several colleagues who invited him to "salons and coffee klatsches" that included Epstein.[49]
Allegations of sexual misconduct
In a February 2018 article describing allegations that "range from offensive comments to groping and non-consensual sexual advances",[50]BuzzFeed reported a variety of sexual misconduct claims against Krauss, including two complaints from his years at Case Western Reserve University.[51] Krauss responded that the article was "slanderous" and "factually incorrect".[50] In a public statement, he apologized to anyone he made feel intimidated or uncomfortable, but stated that the BuzzFeed article "ignored counter-evidence, distorted the facts and made absurd claims about [him]."[52][53] Case Western Reserve responded to the student complaint by restricting Krauss's access to campus, although by the time the sanctions began he had already left for ASU.[51]
ASU stated that they had not received complaints from faculty, staff, or students before the BuzzFeed article but subsequently began an internal investigation regarding an accusation that Krauss grabbed a woman's breast while at a convention in Australia.[4] Investigators interviewed two eyewitnesses, and two other witnesses who immediately spoke with the unnamed woman. The witnesses described the woman as troubled and shocked. The woman told investigators that "she did not feel victimized, felt it was a clumsy interpersonal interaction and thought she had handled it in the moment."[4] ASU found that the preponderance of evidence suggested that Krauss had violated the university's policy against sexual harassment by grabbing a woman's breast without her permission.[54][55] As a result, Krauss was not renewed as director of the Origins Project and the university moved its staff to a project run by planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, formally ending the Origins project.[56]
In response to the university determination, Krauss produced a 51-page appeal document responding to the allegations, including a counter-claim that a photo claimed to be of Krauss grabbing a woman's breast was actually showing his hand moving away from the woman.[57][third-party source needed]
Several organizations also canceled scheduled talks by Krauss.[50] Krauss resigned from the position of chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Board of Sponsors when informed that its other members felt his presence was distracting "from the ability of the Bulletin to effectively carry out [its] work".[58][59]
Following the ASU investigation, Krauss was placed on paid administrative leave starting in March of 2018 and was recommended for dismissal by the dean of the department. He later retired from ASU at the end of the 2018–2019 academic year.[60]
Bibliography
Krauss has authored or co-authored more than three hundred scientific studies[61] and review articles on cosmology and theoretical physics.
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.
Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. His book The Selfish Gene (1976) popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word meme. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.
Peter Ware Higgs was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.
Paul Charles William Davies is an English physicist, writer and broadcaster, a professor in Arizona State University and director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He is affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies in Chapman University in California. He previously held academic appointments in the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Adelaide and Macquarie University. His research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology.
Lisa Randall is an American theoretical physicist and Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. Her research includes the fundamental forces of nature and dimensions of space. She studies the Standard Model, supersymmetry, possible solutions to the hierarchy problem concerning the relative weakness of gravity, cosmology of dimensions, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter. She contributed to the Randall–Sundrum model, first published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum.
Neil Geoffrey Turok is a South African physicist. He has held the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh since 2020, and has been director emeritus of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics since 2019. He specializes in mathematical physics and early-universe physics, including the cosmological constant and a cyclic model for the universe.
David Louis Goodstein was an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor.
David Z. Albert is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the MA Program in The Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University in New York.
The Richard Dawkins Award is an annual prize awarded by the Center for Inquiry (CFI). It was established in 2003 and was initially awarded by the Atheist Alliance of America coordinating with Richard Dawkins and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. In 2019, the award was formally moved to CFI. CFI is a US nonprofit organization that variously claims on its website to promote reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values, or science, reason, and secular values. The award was initially presented by the Atheist Alliance of America to honor an "outstanding atheist", who taught or advocated scientific knowledge and acceptance of nontheism, and raised public awareness. The award is currently presented by the Center for Inquiry to an individual associated with science, scholarship, education, or entertainment, and who "publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead." They state that the recipient must be approved by Dawkins himself.
Sir Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble was a British theoretical physicist, senior research investigator at the Blackett Laboratory and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. His research interests were in quantum field theory, especially the interface between high-energy particle physics and cosmology. He is best known as one of the first to describe the Higgs mechanism, and for his research on topological defects. From the 1950s he was concerned about the nuclear arms race and from 1970 took leading roles in promoting the social responsibility of the scientist.
Brian Paul Schmidt is an American Australian astrophysicist at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He was the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU) from January 2016 to January 2024. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He previously held a Federation Fellowship and a Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2012. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Sean Michael Carroll is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the philosophy of science. He is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He was formerly a research professor at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) department of physics. He also is currently an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and he has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, where he has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope, and New Scientist. He is known for his atheism, his vocal critique of theism and defence of naturalism. He is considered a prolific public speaker and science popularizer. In 2007, Carroll was named NSF Distinguished Lecturer by the National Science Foundation.
Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian experimental particle physicist who is the current and first woman Director-General at CERN in Switzerland. Her first mandate began on 1 January 2016 and ran for a period of five years. At its 195th Session in 2019, the CERN Council selected Gianotti for a second term as Director-General. Her second five-year term began on 1 January 2021 and goes on until 2025. This is the first time in CERN's history that a Director-General has been appointed for a full second term.
The Grand Design is a popular-science book written by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and published by Bantam Books in 2010. The book examines the history of scientific knowledge about the universe and explains eleven-dimensional M-theory. The authors of the book point out that a Unified Field Theory may not exist.
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing is a non-fiction book by the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, initially published on January 10, 2012, by Free Press. It discusses modern cosmogony and its implications for the debate about the existence of God. The main theme of the book is the claim that "we have discovered that all signs suggest a universe that could and plausibly did arise from a deeper nothing—involving the absence of space itself and—which may one day return to nothing via processes that may not only be comprehensible but also processes that do not require any external control or direction."
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee,, is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 50 countries.
Faye Flam is an American journalist. She has written for Science Magazine and wrote two weekly columns for The Philadelphia Inquirer, including one on sex and one on evolution. Flam wrote a book on the influence of sex on human evolution and society. She teaches science writing and lectures on communication to scientific forums, and is a journalism critic for the MIT Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
Quintessence: The Search for Missing Mass in the Universe is the fifth non-fiction book by the American theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss. The book was published by Basic Books on December 21, 2000. This text is an update of his 1989 book The Fifth Essence. It was retitled Quintessence after the now widely accepted term for dark energy.
The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far: Why Are We Here? is the tenth full-length non-fiction book by the American theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss. The book was initially published on March 21, 2017, by Atria Books.
Dr. Melanie Thomson is a microbiologist and science communicator based in Victoria (Australia). She is the General Manager of Education, Skills and Events at the Medical Technologies and Pharmaceuticals Growth Centre.
↑ Nina Burleigh (August 12, 2015). "It's Time for Presidential Candidates to Talk About Science". Newsweek. 'Leading the national discussion requires some basic knowledge of what the important issues are, what is known and not known, and what new efforts need to be commenced,' says physicist Lawrence Krauss. 'Scientific data is not Democratic or Republican.'
↑ "I cannot hide my own intellectual bias here. As I state in the first sentence of the book, I have never been sympathetic to the notion that creation requires a creator. And like our late friend, Christopher Hitchens, I find the possibility of living in a universe that was not created for my existence, in which my actions and thoughts need not bend to the whims of a creator, far more enriching and meaningful than the other alternative. In that sense, I view myself as an anti-theist rather than an atheist." Krauss, Lawrence M., Everything and Nothing: An Interview with Lawrence M. Krauss. Samharris.org, January 3, 2012
↑ Patel, Neel (July 13, 2019). "Jeffrey Epstein liked palling around with scientists—what do they think now?". The Verge. Retrieved January 18, 2022. Krauss has long been an organizer for Epstein's scientific conferences, helping to collect many big names to gather under a single event. The biggest is perhaps a 2006 conference dedicated to understanding gravity, held at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, and bringing in scientists like the late Stephen Hawking
↑ Shea, Parker (September 29, 2018). "ASU's Origins Project to move under Interplanetary Initiative". The State Press. Retrieved March 20, 2019. ASU announced Thursday that the Origins Project, formerly headed by Lawrence Krauss, will move underneath the University's Interplanetary Initiative and lose its name.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
