Prologue, A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives, Chapter 1, Confronting the Mystery, Interlude, Could Our World Have Been Created by a Hacker?, Chapter 2, Philosophical Tour d'Horizon Summary and Analysis

In the prologue, author Jim Holt begins the book with a cute faux argument that is supposed to demonstrate that "something" must exist rather than "nothing" that involves an argumentative slight of hand. In this way, he attempts to demonstrate that the existence of nothing is impossible.

Holt first began to think about the nature of existence in the early 1970s, when he was in high school in rural...