Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jim Alleili and my mission is to interview

the most fascinating and important scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.

My guest today is Lawrence Kraus.

He's a best-selling author.

He's performed with symphony orchestras,

and he attracts audiences of thousands to his public dialogue. with for a professor of theoretical physics. He's also a passionate advocate for rationalism and scientific

understanding in the United States and has come to blows over controversial topics like

creationism in schools and the place of science in the upcoming US elections.

Within science, one of his major achievements was to predict the existence of a mysterious dark

energy in the universe, several years before it was found, although the Nobel Prize for the discovery was later given to three other scientists.

I'll be asking him more about that later.

First of all, Lawrence Krass, welcome to the life scientific.

It's great to be here.

Now, a theme that seems to run through your career is this quest to find answers to some very fundamental questions about our existence,

like where did the universe come from and

where we're going.

Sure it's been a theme in my work because I think it's a theme in most humans lives.

Those are fascinating to everyone and daunting, but it's the fascination that drove me to

study science in general fundamental questions about our existence and I'm lucky

enough to be able to be paid to think about those things.

...