Lawrence Maxwell Krauss (born May 27, 1954) is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who taught at Arizona State University (ASU), Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project in 2008 to investigate fundamental questions about the universe and served as the project's director. Krauss is an advocate for public understanding of science. An anti-theist, Krauss seeks to reduce the influence of what he regards as superstition and religious dogma in popular culture. Krauss is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek (1995) and A Universe from Nothing (2012), and chaired the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Board of Sponsors. Upon investigating allegations about sexual misconduct by Krauss, ASU determined that Krauss had violated university policy, and did not renew his directorship of ASU's Origins Project for a third term in July 2018. Krauss retired as a professor at ASU in May 2019, at the end of the following academic year. He is President of The Origins Project Foundation, Inc. (a new organization, founded in 2019). Krauss hosts The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss and publishes a blog titled Critical Mass. Krauss has faced scrutiny for his association with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He organized a 2006 physics conference funded by an Epstein foundation and received funding from Epstein for an academic project. He also publicly defended Epstein after his 2008 conviction and maintained correspondence and social contact with him over many years.
Early life and education Krauss was born on May 27, 1954, in New York City, but spent his childhood in Toronto. He was raised in a household that was Jewish but not religious. Krauss received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics with first-class honours at Carleton University in Ottawa in 1977, and was awarded a Ph.D. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.
Career 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. 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". In 2009, he helped inaugurate this initiative at the Origins Symposium, in which eighty scientists participated and three thousand people attended. 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. 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. 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. Krauss is a critic of string theory, which he discusses in his 2005 book Hiding in the Mirror. 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". 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. 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. In January 2019, Krauss became President of the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit corporation intended to host public panel discussions on science, culture, and social issues. On June 21, 2019, a new video podcast, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, launched with Krauss as host. The first episodes included dialogues with Ricky Gervais, Noam Chomsky, and Jenny Boylan. In 2024, Krauss edited the book The War on Science, a collection of essays from 39 academics addressing perceived threats to academic freedom and scientific progress, such as DEI programs, wokeness, and cancel culture. Contributors include Nicholas Christakis, Richard Dawkins, Peter Boghossian, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal and Elizabeth Weiss. Krauss wrote an introductory overview and an epilogue. This is his third book published through the conservative Christian imprint Post Hill Press.
Scientific work
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