Like his buddy Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who wrote the Afterward to his book, physicist Lawrence Krauss does not have a ton of patience for theology. Or American schools. Or God. Krauss seems totally unimpressed by deities in general.

In 2009, Krauss gave a lecture entitled "A Universe from Nothing" for the Atheist Alliance International Conference. It became a YouTube sensation, with over a million hits. His book is essentially a transcript of the talk; it has the same quotes, the same jokes, the same disparaging remarks about religion.

But the talk loses something in translation. Online, the figures are in color, whereas in the book they are in black and white, and Krauss has a speaking style that many find compelling. If you like seeing things in print, or want to underline them and review them over and over, read the book; if you are more of an oral learner, or only have an hour to devote to the subject, watch the video. But be warned that Dr. Krauss is wearing a shirt that is the exact same color as the wall behind him, which is kind of disconcerting—like his torso is transparent or something.

Krauss is the Inaugural Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University which, as its name suggests, is interested in origins of all kinds: "the origins of life, consciousness, culture, and human existence; the origins of species and disease; the origins of our planet and the Universe in which it resides." In A Universe From Nothing, he attacks the last of these. He summarizes the overwhelming evidence that not only did our Universe—and possibly others as well—spontaneously arise from nothing, but that it could not have been otherwise; it must have been so. For nothing is inherently unstable; something must always arise from it.

I tend to find cosmological concepts difficult to wrap my head around, and this book was no exception. I did glean some cool tidbits though. For one, the Universe is apparently flat. Not two-dimensional, obviously, but flat meaning that light travels in straight lines. Krauss told Ars "this is the Universe we always thought we lived in," so that is comforting, I suppose.

Also, we ("we" here being people, planets, galaxies, stars, and everything material) are the result of a slight asymmetry in the early Universe in which there was just a touch more matter than antimatter. When antimatter and matter collide, they destroy each other. This, in fact, happened in the early Universe, when all of the antimatter was destroyed and that extra smidgen of matter became stuff. We know this, Krauss told Ars, from the fact that “there are a billion more photons than protons.”

The upshot is this: in the 1920s Edwin Hubble discovered that the Universe is expanding, and the Nobel Prize for 2011 was awarded to three physicists who demonstrated that the rate at which it is doing so is accelerating. Thus, in the future—like two trillion years or so in the future—the 400 billion galaxies that we can currently see will have moved so far away from us that anyone then living on Earth will not be able to detect them. “Like points on a balloon that is being blown up,” Krauss said.

They will not see any evidence of the Big Bang, or of the existence of dark matter and dark energy, or even that the Universe is expanding. They will have the same conception of the Universe that that humanity did before Einstein: that it is eternal and static, and our galaxy is the only significant thing in it. They will be wrong, but they will have no way of knowing that.

Pretty bleak. But in these times, that's probably enough to make the bestseller list. And, if you feel like coming to terms with this and other tidbits about our Universe (and prefer them in book form), Krauss' book provides a reasonable opportunity to learn them.