Tonight’s the premiere of Curiosity on the Discovery Channel, featuring Stephen Hawking talking about cosmology and God, followed by the “Curiosity Conversation” panel that I’m on along with David Gregory, Paul Davies, and John Haught. Hawking’s hour-long show is scheduled for 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific, and will then repeat 3 hours later (11E/8P). Our half-hour panel discussion follows immediately afterward — you do the arithmetic.
There’s a lot to say about these shows, and in particular there’s a huge amount that we didn’t have time to say during the panel. So as I sit in front of the TV, I’ll be live-blogging along by adding updates to this post. This will be the early show, so the fun will happen 8pm-9:30pm Eastern. Hey, Nathan Fillion live-tweets during Castle, so why not me? There is also a chat going on at the Discovery site.
The main attraction of Hawking’s program is not that he has disproven the existence of God. Certainly I don’t think he’s going to be changing the minds of many religious believers. His argument is essentially that the universe is self-contained, and doesn’t really have “room” for God (nor any need to invoke a creator). It’s very easy to wriggle free of that conclusion, if you are inclined not to accept it.
But “changing people’s minds” isn’t the only reason to talk about something, even about controversial issues. Religion, like sex and death, is one of those topics where it’s very difficult to simply have a dispassionate discussion without making people uncomfortable. It can happen within a group of similarly-minded people, of course, but once a wider range of views gets involved, it’s hard to maintain comity. (Comedy, on the other hand, is pretty easy.) I don’t mean everyone has to agree — just the opposite. We should be able to talk about things we completely disagree on, while still maintaining level heads.
That’s why I think this episode of Curiosity is potentially important. It’s a forthright statement of a view that doesn’t often get aired in American media. Even if nobody’s mind is changed, simply talking rationally about this issues would be a step forward.
Pre-show update: I should note ahead of time that I was not wearing a tie. Haught, Davies, and Gregory were all wearing ties. But Hawking wasn’t. Maybe atheists don’t wear ties? (Although I’m pretty sure Jesus never wore a tie, either.)
Start: We begin with a disclaimer! These are Stephen Hawking’s opinions, not those of Discovery. 🙂
4 minutes: I hope the analogy here is clear. “People who believe God made the universe are kind of like the Vikings shouting at the Sun to stop a solar eclipse.”
8 minutes: Snark aside, the message here is a fundamental one. Nature obeys laws! Something that’s certainly not a priori obvious or necessary, but a really profound truth.
14 minutes: I wasn’t able to find an independent confirmation of this story about Pope John XXI condemning the idea of “laws of nature.” (It’s true that he did die when the roof collapsed.) Presumably this refers to the Condemnations of 1277.
20 minutes: The universe is a big, messy, complicated, and occasionally quite intricate place. On the face of it, the idea that it’s all the working-out of some impersonal patterns of matter and energy, rather than being constructed by some kind of conscious intelligence, is pretty remarkable. (But true nonetheless.)
27 minutes: Hey, a tiny ad for Discovery Retreats!
28 minutes: Hawking says Einstein might be the greatest scientist ever. He has long favored Einstein over Newton, I’m not sure why. Hawking appeared on an episode of Star Trek: TNG, where he was a hologram playing poker with Einstein, Newton, and Data. He actually wrote the script, and Newton doesn’t come off well.
36 minutes: Ah, negative energy. Depends on what you mean by “energy,” but this isn’t the venue to get overly technical, obviously. Roughly, matter has positive energy and gravity has negative energy. That’s hopefully enough to help people swallow the crucial point: you can make a universe for nothing. There isn’t some fixed resource, out of which we can make a universe or two, before we hit Peak Universe. There can be an infinite number of universes.
41 minutes: People on Twitter are asking why Hawking doesn’t have a British accent. He easily could, of course; voice-synthesis technology has come quite a way since he first got the system. But he’s said that he now identifies with that voice he got years ago, and doesn’t want to change it; it’s identified with him.
47 minutes: Okay, here’s the payoff. He’s saying that generally we’re used to effects being caused by pre-existing events. (The first step toward a cosmological argument for God’s existence.) You might think that a chain of causation takes you back to the Big Bang, which then requires God as a cause. But no! The Big Bang can just … be.
50 minutes: The point of the black hole discussion is to get to the idea of a singularity, a conjectural point of infinite curvature and density. The Big Bang, in classical general relativity, is also a singular moment. But classical GR isn’t right. We need quantum gravity. Hawking believes that quantum gravity smooths the singularity and explains how there was no pre-existing time. (At least in the TV show, unlike A Brief History, he doesn’t start talking about “imaginary time.”)
56 minutes: Ultimately Hawking’s argument against God is pretty simplistic. He assumes that if God created the Big Bang, God must have existed before the Big Bang, but there was no “before the Big Bang,” QED. It’s easy enough to simply assert that God doesn’t exist “within time” (if that means anything). It would have been better (IMHO) to emphasize that modern cosmology has many good ideas about how the universe could have come to be, so there’s no need to rely on a divine creator.
58 minutes: Final thought from SWH: no life after death! Enjoy it while you’re around, folks. An important message.
Panel discussion starts: Forgot to mention that Paul Davies has shaved off his moustache. Disconcerting.
4 minutes: Also disconcerting: watching myself on TV. Hate it. But I persevere for the greater good.
5 minutes: Here’s Michio Kaku, not saying very much.
7 minutes: Jennifer Wiseman and I were actually grad students together! She’s good people, even if we disagree about the whole God thing.
9 minutes: I come out in favor of basing purpose and meaning on reality. But I’m pretty sure a longer remark was cut off there. Arrrrgh! Nothing nefarious, we intentionally recorded a bit more than they had time to show. But enormously frustrating that there was so little time.
13 minutes: Not sure why we kept talking about the multiverse. Hawking didn’t bring it up, did he?
17 minutes: I thought a lot of what Haught said was not even really trying to argue in favor of God’s existence, but simply expressing a desire that he exist. “God is the grounding of hope” isn’t evidence for God’s existence.
22 minutes: Haven’t said anything completely silly yet, so that’s good. But so little time…
27 minutes: Always time for more Michio!
30 minutes: Arrrrgh again, this time for real: in the live conversation, I had the last word and it was a pretty good one. In the televised program, not so much. Had to end wishy-washy.
Thanks for tuning in. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have the time for a real conversation? But big ups to Discovery for hosting the panel at all — it’s a rare event on TV.
“…then I saw all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. For though a man labors to discover it, yet he will not find it; moreover, though a wise man attempts to know it, he will not be able to find it”
And having NOT “discovered” or “found” anything, despite all the laboring and no matter how wise one may be in the “attempt to know it”, does anybody seriously think this drivel that basaically shuts down every instinctive aspect of curiosity and pursuit of knowledge ostensibly gifted to us – however incomplete and tentative – and perhaps the most important criterion that most of us associate with the human condition, really entitles anyone with a smidgeon of reasoning left intact to suppose this to be an argument FOR the existence of an ineffable agency that is by definition unknowable, and a refutation of the efficacy of rational thinking and reasoning, let alone the scientific method?
Is THAT how come 5000 years of monolithic religion REVEALED all of those nifty things like the nature of those mysterious lights in the night sky as being stars and planets, the existence of atoms and molecules, the genetic basis of life and its evolution, the nature of the 4 fundamental forces and the subatomic players involved, etc, etc., etc…
Oh. Wait.
No, religion was busy doing something completely different. Instead of listening to the putative products of the almighty for a clue, it busied itself with handling the much more practical issue of controlling the minds of the illiterate masses, whichy has today evolved into a political attempt to preserve control over the population.
So?
If this pathetic passage is to be digested, what does it mean to believers?
The interpretation they give is WEIRD:
How come believers “know” so much about this agency, which they themselves insist cannot be known and whose recreational products (ACCORDING TO THE SIMPLEST INTERPRETATION OF THIS PASSAGE) are themselves unknowable or intrinsically indecipherable by “wise men”?
Don’t you people actually R-E-A-D your holy books? Aren’t you ever once even slightly embarassed at the monumentally glaring contradictions between what it ACTUALLY says and your convenient [mis]interpretations? Do you people really think that human intuition and creative imagination is diametrically opposed to reasoning and the operations of logical and rational thinking, or does not synergistically support and inform scientific analysis and reasoning? Are you people really that obtuse and dull-witted?
Following this thread and seeing the baloney blo0ssom has at last pushed me over the edge.
To Phil, mrgriswold, Martin and others who are so stunningly static and irrevocably welded to their theistic views, dismissing whatever additional consideration or perspective anyone else may pose to them or the discussion: At least Owlmirror doesn’t stoop to the ignominious tactic of trying to pass off a blatant con-artist’s trick by redefining a word or concept in order to acquire the objective of appearing to be correct, as Phil does so slickly in his post #169, after lecturing everyone on the true meaning of ‘nothing’ and its alleged impotence, and goes right ahead and, abracadabra, presto-changeo, turns it into a ‘SOMETHING’ by calling it SOMETHING ‘supernatural’, then calls that SOMETHING SUPERNATURAL a creator. Same tricksterism and shoddy logic Aquinas and other theologian “thinkers out there” employ.
Owlmirror has steadfastly maintained and adhered to a rational examination of your claims with an abundance of integrity.
You, on the other hand, just don’t like it if anyone provides a dissenting view, grope hideously to shield yourselves with false arguments from authority and popularity, cast false aspersions of personal attacks exactly like a schoolyard brat given to bullying, have the monumental termerity to presume physicists or atheists are unaquainted with the writings of theologians and philosophers, and dismiss the efficacy of science by casting doubt on the power of reasoning. Shameful. Stupid and just plain dumb are other perfectly serviceable words that come readily to mind that amply and accurately describe your hijincks.
BTW: @mrgriswold post #207: evidently you have a mighty fine talent for focusing what those with an irrational appetite might find digestible. Alas, for you and your ilk, there is a giant and growing population of good folks and no doubt represented in the readersahip here who trust rational arguments, and who will therefore recognize where the stink comes from and readily accept Owlmirrors’s arguments (BECAUSE they are rational) over yours and your fellows (BECAUSE they are utterly irrational and demonstrably false, as I have just shown) without batting an eyelash.
Methinks the rational contingent will win this one.
You guys are disgraceful. yea, even on the eyes of god.
Or don’t you guys subscribe to consistency either?
@Phil#169: So, basically your argument is to magically transform the definition of ‘nothing’ into ‘something’, abracadabra, call it SOMETHING ELSE (‘supernatural’), and in turn call that supernatural something a ‘creator’ which can then be held responsible for causing the universe – simply because you have, uh, demonstrated that nothing is actually something.
I’m sorry, but I am not impressed let alone persuaded by that poor excuse for an ‘argument’.
I would not even qualify it as a legitimate argument. It’s not just a bad argument. Major violations of logic make it a nonsense.
Why not just throw out all the intermediary abracadabras, identify the ‘creator’ as nothing and conclude that a creator doesn’t exist? Wouldn’t that be simpler?
In case you have trouble obtaining independent reasons for why one may consider a creator non-existent, why not give another good look at Thomas Aquinas and “other thinkers out there” in all their tedious loftiness and remind yourself how their definition of the creator is almost unanimously characterized with terms such as “Perfect”, “Almighty”, “Omnipotent”, “Omniscient” and generally Infallible, all of it offered with the DIVINE CERTITUDE one might more cautiously restrict to a GOD.
Then tell us how such attributes so strongly reflect and abundantly characterize all other somethings that meet our experience within the realm of existence.
Do tell us how the many products of a perfect creator are all perfect and without flaw. Then tell us how or why a flawless creator doesn’t incorporate imperfection in his recreational products.
Then, by all means, do tell us how nothing is perfect but god, and go on to explain how god and the perfection of nothingness cannot be the same ‘thing’ . (if perfection is a ‘thing, it must be God with a capital ‘G’, yes?).
Tell us how you know nothing can’t be unstable, then show us how its stability cannot indicate perfection, then explain why we can’t imperfectly not exist.
Oh. Wait. Ok, yeah, you get to go through the whole orbit of circular reasoning all over again. Simply flash your magic handy-dandy all-purpose logic-slaying ‘supernatural’ ray gun, and all is well in a jiffy, and what was once “NOTHING” is now a “SOMETHING”.
THEN tell us how your ‘argument’ remains an “open option” (that is, a SOMETHING) which leaves room (that is, a SOMETHING) for a creator (that is, a SOMETHING).
Tell us how you know so much about ANYTHING that entitles you to turn nothing into something.
Tell us how you arrive at your conclusions with the certitude of a god, with a purity exemplified by the infallible perfection of an almighty creator.
Indeed, tell us how you manage to carry on your contradictions without ever being bothered by them. (THAT would probably be the most psychologically instructive part).
We’re all (if fallible) ears. (So very sorry, but we cannot in our conscience identify ourselves with a god)
Why not let us have it? Come on. Ready, aim, fire. You know the drill. Let’s have it right between the eys. Quit pussy-footing around. What REALLY restrains you and Martin and others from giving us what you REALLY SO BADLY WANT ALL US BACKWARD-TYPE PHYSICISTS AND SCIENTISTS AND DESPICABLE ATHEISTIC TYPES TO KNOW? Please relieve our considerable anxieties over the possibility that you guys aren’t shying away from your intellectual responsibilities to correct our liberall world-wrecking sensibilities and chronic misconceptions. Lord knows (as you claim to ‘know’) that atheists aren’t to be trusted with anything like integrity or a respect for the truth, right?
So, while you are at it, you can teach us all how to cheat just like you do, and transmogrify the meaning of a word into its very opposite, like nothingness into somethingness, you know, just to give YOU something to do in terms of that all-important political exploit on behalf of your god, so that us throwbacks can catch up to your impeccable standard of unimpeachable forth-rightedness (= how to get away with cheating by denying one is ludicrously mistaken).
Don’t beat around the bush: TELL US IT IS OKAY TO DEFINE ‘NOTHING’ AS ‘SOMETHING’ under the auspices of your magical ray-gun tactic of invoking the ‘SUPERNATURAL’ every time you encounter any legitimate puzzle that threatens to hurt your brain.
But mark this possible alternative: Why shouldn’t the ‘supernatural’ – by definition lying OUTSIDE the jurisdiction of ‘SOMETHINGNESS’ – plausibly be considered ‘NOTHING’? For extra credit, explain why your logic is less dilapidated – or more cogent – than that employed in this far simpler conjecture.
And even as you’ve spent all that time and effort enlightening everyone on the nature of NOTHING, then immediately contradict yourself as you demonstrate before our very eyes how self-evidently and pathetically WRONG you are, you are moved to pile it on further with dismissmive snuffs at physicists and readers here, exhibiting the temerity of admonishing them (“Why is that so hard to understand”?) on their alleged congenital lack of comprehension over what is so blazingly obvious to you and nobody else this side of the Deity, whilst zooming yourself to stratospheric heights of audacity in the suggestion that none of us have ever read Aquinas or “other thinkers out there” — is more than sufficient indication of a charlatan’s fevered and hysterical mien, devoid of the slightest particle of scientific integrity, rationality, or ordinary human sincerity.
@ Anchor,
So, did the narrator make the argument that the universe came into being from nothing? Or was the point that one cannot talk about a cause because time itself came into being with the Big Bang, so there was no “before” in which a cause occurred?
Unfortunately, the show didn’t make it clear that we really know nothing about the laws of physics at that tiny scale (quantum gravity). Hence, the statement that the universe could have come into being without violating any of the KNOWN laws of physics is incorrect since we don’t know what those laws are at that tiny scale.
Sure, one can say that the total energy of the universe is 0, so a universe can pop into existence without needing any energy or violating energy conservation. But if the universe, for example, came from “nothing”, then why did the universe come into being at all? The total energy of “nothing” is 0 as well. Thus, why isn’t there still nothing? And one cannot make the argument that the universe could have popped into existence from nothing as a result of quantum mechanics, because there IS no quantum mechanics if there is nothing. And even if, somehow, the universe could have come into being from nothing, why THESE laws and constants, and not others?
So I’m surprised that, to my knowledge, the show didn’t mention the multiverse idea which could resolve these questions by saying there may exist a “universe-generating” mechanism that can make a universe from a pre-existing universe. If a multiverse had always existed “for all eternity”, that could completely do away with the need for a “first cause”. One could just say that the multiverse had always existed with the set of laws that it does, laws which also include some sort of universe-generating mechanism. But that still doesn’t address the question, “Why those laws and not others?” Unfortunately, our knowledge of the laws of physics is still incomplete, so we cannot say for sure whether such a mechanism exists, nor whether other universes exist.
All they referred to was the notion of virtual particles randomly coming into existence from the vacuum of space-time, but this is just an analogy. The vacuum of space-time is not nothing. It is part of the universe.
So concluding that these ideas render a creator unnecessary is, in my opinion, misleading and incorrect.
If the universe came from nothing, then on what grounds can we say that the universe arose from a random quantum fluctuation? If there’s nothing, literally nothing, then the idea “quantum fluctuation” makes no sense — it doesn’t even exist, it’s not possible. If you have nothing, you stay with nothing.
Does there exist a being which transcends space and time? No? Why not? Can you use science to answer the question?
You cannot make the argument that God created the universe from nothing, because there IS no God if there is nothing.
If you redefine “nothing” to mean “God, and nothing else”, then cosmologists are free to define “nothing” to mean “the laws of quantum mechanics (and whatever other fundamental physics is necessary), and nothing else”
Obviously, they’re what they are because that’s what they are.
Only if you reject the principle of parsimony. But I understand that that’s a popular move among theists.
And the same argument holds for God, only more so.
You can use the principle of parsimony to argue that no being which transcends space and time has been shown to be necessary to explain anything, and cut that sucker out.
What does it mean to say that something “exists” outside space and time? Seems to me that to posit this is to abuse the verb “exist” (and to admit, without saying so, that nothing could have existed before the Big Bang…unless we give a whole new meaning to “exist” that allows such a possibility).
Another notion of the believers that I take kinda personally is the notion that life can have no meaning outside their system of belief: just because the believers cannot conceive of subjective meaning outside of their belief systems don’t mean that we unbelievers feel so bereft! I have a family, loved ones, and a whole planet full of folks who lend meaning to my life…no need for a belief in the supernatural there! Furthermore, I personally enjoy living way too much to throw it away…unlike too many believers, I don’t see me getting out of this life alive! So, please, spare me the “life has no meaning without God” BS!
A concept I would like to offer is that with which Dan Brown concludes his Robert Langdon trilogy: that is, that the Founding Fathers regarded God not as a supreme Being, but as a supreme Symbol of the good (in line with their Masonic thinking about the efficacy of symbols)…this would explain their peculiar ambivalence to the concept (can’t wait for The Lost Symbol to come out on the big screen, BTW…do so hope Tom Hanks reprises the part!)
OK, unbelievers, buck up: you’re not alone. If you believe anything, believe this: there’s a lot more of us out there than you might have been led to believe!
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I think the big bang has been described as an explosion of energy,,, ‘light’… It filled the universe,, creating it as it expanded…
Interesting,,, God’s ‘1st words’ spoken, “Let There Be Light” !!!
“You cannot make the argument that God created the universe from nothing, because there IS no God if there is nothing.”
By ‘nothing’, I mean no space, no time, no matter, no energy, no fermions, no bosons.
“If you redefine “nothing” to mean “God, and nothing else”, then cosmologists are free to define “nothing” to mean “the laws of quantum mechanics (and whatever other fundamental physics is necessary), and nothing else””
Ok, but the laws of physics do not exist in some Platonic realm, outside of space and time. The laws are something we invent/discover as the pattern by which the world works. If there is no world, there are no laws of quantum mechanics or physics.
“Obviously, they’re what they are because that’s what they are.”
And that’s not an explanation. And that definitely doesn’t explain why the laws of constants of our universe are so well-tuned to allow for the possibility of life to evolve.
“You can use the principle of parsimony to argue that no being which transcends space and time has been shown to be necessary to explain anything, and cut that sucker out.”
Even if you can show that God is not necessary to explain anything, you haven’t shown God doesn’t exist.
You need a being that transcends space and time in order to create space and time from a state that did not have space and time. That is, if there is no multiverse, and our space and time had a beginning, then you need a being that transcends space and time to create our universe because the laws of physics do not somehow exist outside space and time, so our universe couldn’t have been caused by a “quantum fluctuation”. Nor have you answered my question, “Why something rather than nothing if the energy content of nothing is still 0?” Hawking’s explanation is not an explanation at all.
This ‘argument’ goes into eternity….
Belief in God is Not Something you can choose to do…
Those that believe in A God,, simply believe in him, and not out of proof or logic.
But out of Faith.
Faith is a Gift..
Those that do not believe in a God,, CANNOT believe in A God…
They are bound by ‘logic’ , they are hard wired to think in only ‘logic’
they cannot open up the intuitive side of themselves, they dont and they cannot understand that..
They do not have the gift of Faith.
Faith comes in only 2 ways,, either you are given it freely or it is prayed for…
If you dont believe in a God its hard to pray for.
Others may pray for you…
Those that do believe, simply believe.
They need no logic for his, its just there, they ‘know’ it to be true.
This is impossible to understand for those without faith or unbielevers…
Hawkings simply ‘gives up’.
He’s always wanted a simple equation to explain everything.
He cant find it, he never will, no one will…..
He’s given up and explained it as ‘Nothing’..
“and the more the wise man will say he knoweth it, he will not be able to find it”
E.F.
It’s my humble opinion that an understanding of the “Documentary Hypothesis”
is pre-requesite to any discussions of “Creationism”.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/jepd_gen0.htm
Note that historically “J” preceded “P”. Additionally the form of the creation account
in ch. 1 of Genesis is identical to the form of the Babylonian “Enuma Elish”. Now factor
in the Babylonian Captivity which obviously influenced the Priestly Writer and
compromised his work. Most christians think of a whore in the service of Satan when Babylon is mentioned. So much for divine inspiration.
Consider also that Emperor Constantine saw the need for a redactor to to tie up a few
loose ends.
Search on-line “Prolegomena to the History of Israel” by Julius Wellhausen,
read section 1 of ch. 8. “J” stands closer to the fountain.
Except that you also mean, in addition to that, some ill-defined something that (purportedly) isn’t anything in that list, but is an invisible person with magical superpowers, one of those superpowers being the power to “make” everything in that list.
Same argument could go for God: “God” does not exist in some Platonic realm, outside of space and time. “God” is something you invent/invoke to explain the world. If there is no world, there is no God.
While I agree that the laws of physics are discoveries, they are discoveries about how space/time/energy/matter behave. One of those discoveries was that while “spontaneous creation/annihilation” is not the general rule at the macro level, it does happen at the subatomic level.
Generalizing from that, it is conjectured that a lack of space/time/matter/energy can also support spontaneous creation/annihilation — which is exactly the role conjectured for your invisible person with magical superpowers, only more parsimoniously.
Presumably the “law” that allows this simply exists — not in a Platonic realm, but as a meta-law of reality.
If you cannot explain where “outside of time and space” is for your invisible person with magical superpowers to “exist” there, why are you getting so upset at the notion that maybe there’s just a law of physics there, instead of an invisible person with magical superpowers?
Would you prefer it if it were said to be ontologically necessary?
I would have thought they’re “well-tuned” to allow for hydrogen. Life is more or less a tiny fluke in the universe at large.
You don’t understand parsimony, do you?
Even if you can show that Santa Claus is not necessary to explain anything about Christmas, you haven’t shown that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
Yes, you can show that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Just look all over the Earth for him, look up all over the sky on Christmas Eve. If you don’t see Santa flying with reindeer, nor find Santa all over the Earth with a slew of powerful satellites that can see the surface and through the surface, then Santa doesn’t exist. You’ve used science to show he doesn’t exist.
One cannot do this to show God doesn’t exist.
So why not be an agnostic?
Anyway, you cannot get anything from nothing and if science somehow is consistent with the idea that our universe was born from nothing, then there must be something transcending space and time that created our universe. That is, if your fundamental theory does not allow for the existence of other universes and if your fundamental theory doesn’t allow for an initial state of our universe that had always existed “before” the (classical) Big Bang singularity, then how do you explain the origin of the universe?
[After submitting multiple times and having the comment vanish, I think I may know what was wrong. Trying one more time:]
Congratulations. You’ve proved that you can’t see Santa Claus with the naked eye or with the current satellites in orbit. You haven’t proved that he doesn’t exist.
You can look with the most powerful telescopes, and prove that God hasn’t been seen with those.
I am an agnostic. But I’m also an atheist, because I don’t believe there’s a God, because no-one has shown any good reason to believe that there is one.
Since God is not “nothing”, this applies to God as well.
That’s more or less what cosmologists like Hawking are saying. It’s just that “something” is a fundamental law of physics, not an invisible person with magical superpowers.
It was a great show and I was really excited to watch the panel discussion after (more please).
My Comments:
First: Hawking did fine with mention about Aristarchus but then he went and said that Galileo was the one who purported the heliocentric solar system (over the geocentric system); did Hawking forget about Copernicus or is he favoring Galileo because they have like birthdays (I hope not)!??!! In a Google search of “Galileo” it had mentioned that he (Galileo), “…supported the Copernican system”. Copernicus had his work published when he was on his deathbed: “On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres” (http://www.historyguide.org/earlymod/dedication.html) for fear of a heresy persecution. Galileo then became more vocal about the sun-centered solar system (and improved on the Copernican system having concocted his new invention—the telescope) and too because he knew the Pope (name?) quite well and was frequently invited to the Popes’ functions and inner circle of friends. Galileo got in trouble later when there was a new Pope and when Galileo had made a play/book about the problem between science and religion, with two characters: one, himself, the ‘smart-and-intellectual’ character and the other called “simpliceo” was made out to be the a simple-headed dunce and was directed at the Pope and the Catholic church. The Pope was NOT amused! Anyway…there is more to the story of a heliocentric solar system than just Galileo recanting his ‘heresy’ and then (supposedly) mumbling under his breath: “and yet it moves”!! Frankly, Galileo was lucky to only receive, house arrest.
Second: I was disappointed that no one gave the ‘history’ behind the term: “Big Bang”. Basically (and please do look into this); cosmologist Fred Hoyle (considered to be an atheist—at least at the time…) had a derisive talk with Georges Lamaitre, ridiculing him for his idea of a “primordial atom” (a sort-ta Finnish creation story of their “cosmic egg”). Lamaitre can be seen in “images” (via google) discussing with Einstein, singularity event mathematics. So what’s wrong with Georges (he was a cosmologist and mathematician and graduated—did studies–at MIT)? ANS: George was a Belgian Catholic priest! Check out the only book he wrote: “A Day without Yesterday” and Google, “Georges Lamaitre”. Georges’ idea of a cosmic egg or “primordial atom” hints to something of design (perhaps the energy is imbued with information at the beginning event?). In any event the Big Bang was not big and there was no bang if anything it was low entropic, orderly, and high heat…and falls outside of our current understanding and seeing as how the heat is bleeding out (WMAP about 2.7 degrees K) then it seems that a heat-death via a cooling of the expanding universe will be the demise of man and blend all information into a state of uselessness (high entropy of information=heat stabilization, information loss, and too the end of all order which allows for the processes of life). You still have to pay your taxes though!
Third: This idea of something out of nothing just does not swallow (throw all the mathematics at me you want), there is something basically ‘off’ about it. Although I must be ready to back-peddle as what is it that the information bleeds away to—just the rim of a black-hole? It looks like in an expanding universe the conservation of energy is violated: if it is expanding it will rip apart; if it is curving back on itself then we are in for a big crunch; and if it is doing neither, but has a nearly perfect Euclidian flatness then…aren’t we lucky?! And ‘who’ balanced the pencil on its point for all these billions of years? It is too WEIRD—it’s the greatest science fiction novel ever written with the concluding sentence being “and it’s true”! Everything that is, cannot come from everything that is not. I actually have about 10 books about the topic of “nothing” (one of these days I’m going to buy one and the pages will be blank—and it will serve me right!). As most of us should know at the atomic level there is more space in an atom then there is substance and that perhaps (for sure) that space is fixed only by the uncertainty of the electrons’ orbital. But still aren’t there going to be forces in that space? ANS: we know there are forces: weak force, strong force and etc but there also comes into my head (from some odd corner…cough cough; sorry!) the idea that information and relationship are also forces. There becomes a point where that which we take for granted as ‘substance’ ends with abstractness and knowledge (information)…. Memories (of past events and experiances) are powerful and yet cannot be measured but can be utilized to make future/present decisions. Many abstract concepts in life we hold as very dear; very important: integrity, honesty, courage, love etc etc…but not one of them have the empirical ability to be measured. I believe that there is something in those words (nothing, something, everything) that is a problem and it has bent our reasoning for hundreds of years. The problem is…that which is common to all those words: the word “thing”. What if there really is no such ‘thing’ as a “thing” and that all such things are just energy which at its basic is not-measurable (in our friendly condition of dimension: length width and depth) but can (or should) only be measured like that before the energy condenses out into matter as states E=MC^2? Matter is just energy by the square of light speed and frankly, we are not really sure what light is! And seeing as how light plays a big part in figuring out what matter is (and we ARE matter—our bodies are at least) then we NEED to know more about light!! Anyone want to consider how many times the Bible mentions light (sorry to wiggle in that book…but those folks back then also had similar questions and concerns!)?!! We use the word “thing” like the ancients used the word aether. A water wave is only a wave because of the water that is displaced but a light wave is different and needs no medium to travel through…of course this is (in part) the dilemma of the two-slit experiment.
Two quick questions:
1) Why can’t the ‘stuff’ that goes down a black hole come back somehow as invisible dark matter or energy and be the cause of the force which is expanding the distances between the galaxies (stretching the fabric of the universe)? This would be fitting with the conservation of energy…but it would require a very slowly closing (not expanding) universe (I think) and too, we are back to: “What is the universe expanding into?”
2) If one can recognize a situation of “information” (like walking down a perfect undisturbed beach and seeing; “S.O.S.” written in the sand) then one knows without doubt that some intelligence placed it there…regardless of seeing any footprints or not and even if one understood what the letters meant? Don’t we recognize information in the cosmological constants and cycles of “Nature” Like the proton-proton chain or CNO Cycle? if so…then why cannot there be an intelligence behind that information which also designs up the relationships that we see in the sciences? If there were no order, purpose, design, repeatable occurrences then there would be no reason to ‘do’ science…in fact I believe it would not even exist (there can be no concept of science…in a condition of chaos).
Sean Carroll…GREAT JOB! I especially appreciated your open mind and easy going talk…. Keep up the good work
Gordon Tatro
“Congratulations. You’ve proved that you can’t see Santa Claus with the naked eye or with the current satellites in orbit. You haven’t proved that he doesn’t exist.”
But you can also figure out what kind of gravitational waves Santa emits every Christmas Eve while he’s flying in the sky delivering presents to children. If no gravitational waves are detected, then Santa doesn’t exist. Since everything that exists in the universe couples to gravity, that’s a sure way to determine that Santa doesn’t exist.
“You can look with the most powerful telescopes, and prove that God hasn’t been seen with those.”
But God transcends space and time. That’s why he was able to create the space and time of our universe. So you can’t find him with those powerful telescopes. 🙂
So, since we know nothing about what the fundamental theory of physics is (the theory that will, presumably, allow us to progress through the issue of the origin of our universe as much as science can allow us), it is misleading and incorrect for Hawking to say that the known laws of physics render a creator unnecessary.
How do you know quantum mechanics (or whatever) can exist without a universe there? What does “quantum mechanics” govern? General Relativity governs the curvature of spacetime and how objects move through spacetime? What does GR govern without a universe? What does quantum mechanics govern without a universe? The equations and principles of GR do not transcend spacetime because it is a theory of spacetime. Likewise, quantum mechanics does not transcend space and time because QM governs the behavior of subatomic particles, which can only reside in space and time.
I’m sorry, who says that Santa is massive enough to emit gravity waves that are detectable?
You could say the same about Santa Claus. What does “transcends space and time” even mean, that God does it and Santa can’t?
But we don’t know nothing. We know enough about physics to make reasonable conjectures.
Not at all. Hawking is being parsimonious in positing that the physical laws for universe-creation will be the same as or very similar to those that allow virtual particles.
Why shouldn’t they exist? How do you know that there is an outside to space-time where a God could exist, but laws of quantum mechanics cannot?
I wasn’t aware that God had died and put you in charge of the domains of the physical laws.
Look; we already have proof of the existence of virtual particle creation. All that’s necessary is either a different application of the same law to allow for space-time creation, or a slightly different law that does that when there’s no space-time.
“I’m sorry, who says that Santa is massive enough to emit gravity waves that are detectable?”
Any mass can give off gravitational waves which are, in principle, detectable. We just need the technology to do it.
“You could say the same about Santa Claus. What does “transcends space and time” even mean, that God does it and Santa can’t?”
Santa has a body and a beard, which takes up space and time. He travels through space and time, and he handles presents, which take up space and time. Thus, he does not transcend space and time. Santa needs spacetime in order to exist (if he did), God doesn’t. Why? Because God created spacetime.
“But we don’t know nothing. We know enough about physics to make reasonable conjectures.”
So you think it’s reasonable to say that the universe came into existence from nothing? Sure, we do know plenty of physics and our physics knowledge allows us to explain pretty much every experiment we can perform at the moment. But we still don’t know what physics or the universe is like at the Planck scale and we need to know this to determine what exactly happened at the Big Bang “singularity”. We don’t know what happened because we don’t have the proper theory. We need to know what physics is like at every energy scale up to the Planck scale and, at present, we don’t have the technology needed to perform experiments that probe that scale. So we don’t know anything that we need to know to settle the issue of the origin of the universe.
“Why shouldn’t they exist? How do you know that there is an outside to space-time where a God could exist, but laws of quantum mechanics cannot?”
So describe for me in what form do the laws of quantum mechanics exist. What are their origins. What are they made of? Why those laws and not just classical laws? I’ve already explained why I think it’s incorrect to think of those laws as somehow existing without a universe in which (and on which) to act. I don’t what else to say. 🙂
“I wasn’t aware that God had died and put you in charge of the domains of the physical laws.”
The equations and principles of GR together form a theory of spacetime and how matter and energy distort that spacetime and how objects move through that spacetime. It is a very useful tool that allows us to describe our universe and make accurate predictions. It is only valid within a certain domain (i.e. in that domain where quantum effects can be ignored). So it’s useless to talk about GR as somehow transcending space and time, as if it can exist outside of spacetime. Any scientific law or principle is something that applies to the physical system for which it is used to describe. Without any physical systems, the law or principle can do nothing. That’s as true for Newtonian mechanics as it is true for GR or QM or QFT or even the fundamental theory of physics, whatever it may turn out to be.
God didn’t put me in charge. That’s the way it is if you care to look at it.
“Look; we already have proof of the existence of virtual particle creation. All that’s necessary is either a different application of the same law to allow for space-time creation”
Spacetime creation from what? Out of what? The universe consists of spacetime and all the particles (fermions and bosons) that interact within this spacetime, and the spacetime also interacts with the fermions and bosons. What creates spacetime? So far, physics has shown us that all there is is spacetime, and a bunch of particles, some of them matter particles and some force-carrying particles. That’s all. So what will create spacetime? The virtual pair production is just an analogy. Particles appear out of the vacuum of spacetime. Particles are made, not from nothing, but from the zero-point energy of spacetime.
“or a slightly different law that does that when there’s no space-time.”
Slightly different? If you hope to accomplish that feat, it would take more than a slightly different law. And what will this “law” or “mechanism” act on in order to create spacetime? What does this law describe if there’s nothing around to describe? What is the system? All we have are particles within spacetime. Take away spacetime and you’re left with nothing.
In my opinion, the only kind of space-time creation is space-time creation from a pre-existing spacetime. Unfortunately, we do not have at our disposal a definitive theory of Planck scale physics that allows us to calculate what happens at that scale. We only have prospects (i.e. string theory, “M-theory”).
although i respect Mr. Hawkings’ mind and brilliance, I am slightly surprised he would come off soo arrogant and myopic on his definitive conclusion that -‘there is no God, and heaven does not exist.’ I still look forward to his future revealations within the scientific community, however, it seems to me, since he couldn’t prove the existance of a devine hand at work, he set out to disprove it.
Hawking, like Einstein, Marx, and so many others before them, is very careful before he ventures an hypothesis: he knows that science cannot prove anything, only disprove hypotheses (hence his caution about contacting extraterrestrial civilisations more advanced than our own, based on how less-advanced cultures have fared when contacted by more-advanced ones on this planet: he’s not saying that they will be hostile…merely that we assume their benevolence at our peril).
What Hawking is venturing is a disproof: namely of the hypothesis that God created the universe. This, he maintains, is far easier to disprove than the nonexistence of leprechauns, unicorns, etc. somewhere in the universe, because it’s the whole package we’re talking about.
Again, Hawking’s disproof rests on recursion, or extrapolation backwards: it simply isn’t possible for anything, anything at all, to have existed before the Big Bang. Not an easy concept for the human mind to wrap itself around…but one directly inferred from the experimental evidence.
I’m not gonna waste my time or breath trying to convert one single believer: I know they live and breathe their parallel universe of belief.
What I will do, however, is defend my POV against them, and help reassure unbelievers: you are not alone…they have their God, we have each-other.
Faith is a great gift, eh? Let me draw you a picture I would like to see as a bumper sticker:
It’s of the RMS Titanic, going down. Caption: “Captain Smith Had Faith”…
Finally, let me lay a concept on you from Harlan Ellison: when belief in a god dies, the god dies. Where are Zeus and Thor and Huitzilopochtli nowadays? Why, they’ve lost their following…
…It’s not for nothing that the Romans feared the new monotheistic mystery cult of Christianity: they understood that monotheism is but one god away from atheism.
Thank you, monotheists, for preparing the way for atheism! The pleasure…is ours.
Maybe Hawking’s not as smart as he thinks. Saw analysis of flaws in his theory at andhow.blogspot.com
It’s more reasonable than saying that God created the universe from nothing.
If we did, cosmologists wouldn’t be conjecturing different scenarios, now would they?
In what form does God exist? What is God made of? Where is outside of spacetime that God supposedly exists? What is God’s origin? What did God do to create spacetime, and how did he do it, and why did he do it that way and not some other way? How do you know that God exists as a person, and is not just the laws of physics?
But you’re fine with positing a God which exists without a universe in which and on which to act!
How about realizing that you’re making less sense than Stephen Hawking?
What does God create spacetime from? What does God create energy from? What does God create laws from?
See, you end up having to answer the same questions that cosmologists do, and you posit more entities that require even more questions.
And can you prove that there was no zero-point energy before the big bang?
And yet you hope to accomplish everything with a God that purportedly “exists” in no space and no time with no laws at all. What does existence even mean, in that case?
What does God act on in order to create space time?
Where does God exist, if there’s nowhere for God to exist?
Which means that there’s even less of a system for God to exist in.
Which is unstable, say some cosmologists, and therefore you can get everything from nothing with the physical laws that govern that instability.
I’m not really sure what God is made of or how He created the universe from nothing (assuming the universe WAS created from nothing). If you want to learn more about God, in what sense God transcends space and time, and what kind of existence He has, check out the writings of some theologians, Thomas Aquinas. 😉
I have no idea how our universe was made (if it was made through natural processes), and regardless of how much sense the notion of a God creating it makes, it also makes no sense to suggest that the universe came into existence from nothing, as I explained above.
If there is no multiverse (and we don’t know the answer to that without knowing what the fundamental theory is, which Stephen Hawking doesn’t know), then, no, there was no zero-point energy before the big bang because if there is no multiverse then our universe did not come from a “parent universe”. Therefore, no zero-point energy from which our universe could have been born.
Where did you come across the notion that “nothing” is unstable? Was this worked out in a paper somewhere? I’m curious. It would be interesting to know why they concluded that “nothing” is unstable rather than stable. I mean, when you say that something is unstable it would imply (I think!) that there is some process which can turn that unstable state to a stable state. But stable and unstable with regards to what? Energy? But with “nothing” there is no concept of energy. There is nothing. Or do they mean that “nothing” is unstable under tiny perturbations of “nothing”. How do you perturb “nothing”? If there is “nothing”, then there is nothing around to do the perturbing. “The physical laws that govern that instability”? But this brings me back to my point. If there is “nothing” there are no laws. So it would be interesting to read and figure out what they meant.