The Worst April Fool’s Joke Ever: Everything from Nothing

In 1926 a German company newspaper announced the advent of the triple-decker city bus. Image courtesy of Echo Continental. It was by no means the worst April Fool’s prank.


Joel Kontinen


It might not have seen daylight on April 1, but it is almost certainly the joke that has had more effect than any other.

It is the belief that everything comes from nothing, or that no Designer or Creator is needed.

To make it sound more plausible, it is often presented as a scientific theory.

However, we know that things or even natural laws don’t make themselves, regardless of what Stephen Hawking might believe. It seems that someone has been pulling our leg – and hard.

If they have to invoke a quantum fluctuation or “the law of the higgledy-piggledy” (as astronomer and philosopher John Herschel famously called natural selection), or spelling mistakes (a.k.a. mutations), we might suspect that something is very much amiss there.