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Richard Conn Henry, The Universe does not exist (Minkowski Institute Press, Montreal), 352 pages. ISBN: 978-1-998902-73-6 (ebook) - $8.00 ISBN: 978-1-998902-72-9 (softcover) - $21.00 ISBN: 978-1-998902-74-3 (hardcover) - $30.00 Published on 18 February 2026 Buy the ebook (PDF with hyperlinks)

This book describes how physics leads inexorably to the conclusion that its own objects of study - light, particles, planets, stars, galaxies, the Universe and you and me - do not actually exist. How can that be? What explains the world we think we see, and how is it that we all (more or less) see the same one? You will have to read this book to find out!

Other popular books, especially those on quantum mechanics, cover some of the same ground but shrink from this conclusion; they leave the reader with the impression that there are many competing "interpretations" available, including contenting ourselves with experiments and asking no questions about what they mean. By contrast, this book is unsparing in its rigor: the experimental facts must be faced squarely along with their implications. Those facts are laid out in the form of 56 short "chapters" of a few pages each with titles such as "Is this a new discovery?" "Why didn't I know this already?" "Quantum mechanics explained," "Sensing the dimensionality of space," "Back to the future," "The future of the human race" and "What should you do next?" They are based on the author's articles in respected journals including Nature and the American Journal of Physics. But the author is an astronomer, not a physicist, and he has written this book primarily for people who are highly intelligent but have little or no formal education in physics.

Popular books on physics often tend to be long on gee-whiz, and short on real explanation. This one goes the opposite way. Readers who wish additional mathematical details can find them on the author's website, https://henry.pha.jhu.edu/rch.html.

Note from Minkowski Institute Press: This is a unique and brilliantly provocative book. What makes it even more valuable is that Professor Henry's arguments for the non-existence of the Universe may instead prove that quantum objects do not exist continuously in time, precisely because his arguments rely on the implicit assumption of their continuous existence.

For details about how bringing the idea of atomism to its logical completion - discreteness not only in space, but in time as well (4-atomism = atomism in spacetime) - resolves all apparent quantum-mechanical paradoxes, see the paper "The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument in spacetime and in what sense quantum mechanics is fundamentally incomplete" and the references therein. The revolutionary idea of 4-atomism was first published in the eighties by the Bulgarian physicist Anastas Anastassov.

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