Something From Nothing ...

I’ve written about this problem before—the “why is there something rather than nothing” problem—which I regard as the second most important unsolved mystery of the cosmos. The first, of course, being love, a similarly unfathomable mystery, one aspect of which I wrote about recently in exploring the implications of a single line by the great poet Philip Larkin (“What will survive of us is love”—survive us where, for instance?). The third greatest mystery, in case you care, is the mystery of consciousness, its origin and locus, mind versus meat (brain). 
There’s a similarity in these unsolvable mysteries: Poets are the physicists of love, but, as I suggested, in Larkin’s case at least, their work is marked by humility, a tender tentativeness. Whereas physicists tend to be know-it-alls. Ever since the success of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, it seems like all a physicist needs to do to get a book contract is claim to explain how the universe emerged. There’s Alan Guth’s The Inflationary Universe, Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality, and, more recently, Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing. 
This is why I want to spotlight a new development, an admission that was overlooked in the Higgs hype, a disguised concession of defeat by one of the “nothing theorists.”