Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: A quick proof that there must be something rather than nothing, for modern people who lead busy lives
1. Confronting the mystery
Interlude: Could our world have been created by a hacker?
2. Philosophical tour d'horizon
Interlude: The arithmetic of nothingness
3. A brief history of nothing
4. The Great Rejectionist
5. Finite or infinite?
Interlude: Night thoughts at the Café de Flore
6. The inductive theist of North Oxford
Interlude: The supreme brute fact
7. The Magus of the Multiverse
Interlude: The end of explanation
8. The ultimate free lunch?
Interlude: Nausea
9. Waiting for the final theory
Interlude: A word on many worlds
10. Platonic reflections
Interlude: It from bit
11. "The ethical requiredness of there being something"
Interlude: An Hegelian in Paris
12. The last word from All Souls
Epistolary interlude: The proof
13. The world as a bit of light verse
14. The self: do I really exist?
15. Return to nothingness
Epilogue: Over the Seine

"Why is there a world rather than nothing at all? This question remains the most curious and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Moving away from the narrower paths of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking who insist that science alone is capable of explaining how our cosmos came into being, the author enters this debate as he examines our efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. He takes on the role of cosmological detective, and traces the riddle of existence from the ancient world to modern times, suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God and the Big Bang theory." --Descripción del editor