.SECTION_NO_NUMBER Preface
.PARAGRAPH_INDENTED
The preface is about what simplistic ideas we have of the creation of the universe, mostly religious ones.
Religion argues for an infinite regression that could only be solved by some magic being that conveniently appears to be
.I infinite
and
.I eternal
so our universe doesn't have to.
Theologians and religious people are a bit mocked for their many, many dishonest arguments to keep their beliefs.
For example, the
.I "Intelligent Design"
concept, which not only requires to ignore a lot of what we actually
.B do
know about life on earth, but also serves as a magic all-in-one concept without any consistency to reject evolution.
Invoking a god to explain
.I how
stuff appears is intellectually lazy and is at best irrelevant.

Science is our best effort to understand our universe, and it follows three key principles\*[*]
.FOOTNOTE1
The following definition really is simplistic and only covers the general idea behind science.
Do not take it for an absolute definition.
.FOOTNOTE2
:
.BULLET
.UL "follow the evidence"
wherever it leads;
.BULLET
.UL "theories should be tried to prove wrong"
as much as we try to prove them right;
.BULLET
.UL "experiment is the only truth" ,
not beliefs nor mathematical elegance of a model.
.ENDBULLET
Science can make people uncomfortable since it changes how we view the world, and this happened quite a few times in history.
With recent discoveries, one may even wonder if the
.I "laws of nature"
really are fundamentals.

Krauss introduces the concept that maybe the universe could come from nothing.
And
.I nothing
is something rather odd, and we don't actually have experienced it so we can't make much assumptions on it.
First we thought that
.I nothing
could be a simple
.I "quantum vacuum"
but now we know that a vacuum (a space without any material entity) isn't really nothing since there are still space and time applied to it.
Even then, we know that space and time can spontaneously appear.
Since the concept of
.I nothing
isn't by any mean trivial to understand, the book
.[
a-universe-from-nothing
.]
will explain it in details later.