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.
Someone made a comment that went, “science checks its facts–religion doesn’t.” Uh-huh. Science is a process, not some sort of intellectual institution–a process of observation, hypothesis, testing, and re-evaluating. With all due deference to the show’s producers and their efforts to blame all past incorrect theories and outlooks on “religion,” it was the scientific process that gave the world the flat earth, the earth-centered universe, the sun-centered universe, the steady-state universe, and so on. All these were theories based on observation and insufficient information.
The intensely brief existence of particles in the quantum background is not analogous to a universe springing into existence uncaused out of nothing. Particles do not spring into existence from “nothing.” They come into being as particles out of the quantum background energy state CAUSED by quantum variations in that energy. They are CAUSED, not spontaneous, and they come into being out of SOMETHING, so there is yet another reason why this phenomenon is not isomorphic to the special’s model of creation.
Now, who can spot all the logical fallacies in the statement “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing”? And if the universe came into being as Hawking attempts to describe, how is it that it happened to have the dozens of finely-tuned characteristics necessary for life? While I am suspending some levels of skepticism in the expectation there is more to the story the producers couldn’t get into the special, I thought the special was riddled with factual and logical error. Hawking and the producers have simply moved the pea and hope the viewers don’t look under the other shell.
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Jessie, if you can’t even get Stephen Hawking’s name right, nobody’s going to read your arguments. Which, of course, are fatuous.
I’m seeing a lot of comments along the lines of: “It’s not possible that the universe formed out of absolutely nothing. There MUST have been something that existed for the universe to expand out from.”
Maybe so. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s true. How does it follow, then, that the existence of the universe must be the result of an intentional act?
Why is it impossible for that to be a natural event?
Show your work.
Mr. Hawkings makes a case for the non-existence of God to the masses of under-informed viewers who cannot take into account the myriad unanswered questions of science nor can they fathom the depth of the ongoing research. Quantum mechanics isn’t something that can be discussed matter-of-factly in a one hour program. Many unknowns still exist and the “theories” are exactly that.
Conversely, it is true that man has created god in his own image by attributing all unexplained things to a higher power of understanding and knowledge. In the long curious search for answers science has observed and delineated many of the laws of Nature that were previously unexplained. This doesn’t disprove the existence of God. In fact, it is quite egocentric to imply that God does not exist when considering all that remains undiscovered.
In order to denounce the existence of God, science would have to provide answers to everything with no more questions–Omniscience, which would yield Omnipotence. Only then would we have the “mind of God” that Einstein referred to often. Only then would our society reflect the power of all-knowledge and be united in understanding.
I find it disconcerting that Discovery would air a program that exploits the uninformed with the imbued sense of concrete evidence. The program that aired afterwards, “Into the Universe” was ego-maniacal, in my opinion, because it discussed the existence of life as a random unison of particles over time when this is one of the major stumbling blocks in science’s attempt to disprove God.
For the uninformed, the program should have stated clearly that life in the single cell itself is so complex that the random generation of life is mathematically impossible. That is a fact. I am sure that many were offended by this apparent subversion of their long-held contentions and beliefs.
I, however, welcome the argument with fervor. Bring it on!
I guess it is the nature of faithists to repeat the same old, long-discredited ideas over and over, just as it is the nature of science to probe questions and demand evidence and discard discredited ideas. If some wonder why some atheists seem grumpy, having to answer the same foolish “gotcha” questions over and over will do that to a person, but one more time:
This universe is not finely-tuned for our kind of life. Our kind of life can exist where? On Jupiter? No. On the Sun? No. On Venus? No. In space? No. You don’t have an electronic calculator with enough decimal digits in its display to show the number of zeroes needed to express the fraction of this universe in which our kind of life can exist.
If you think it’s some kind of miracle than there is even a minuscule fraction of a universe where life based on liquid water chemistry could exist, you’re wrong, because studies by Dr. Stengler and others have shown that in fact a large range of physical constants other than those this universe has could also support such life.
But ultimately your problem is a lack of imagination which makes it inconceivable to you that other, better, more intelligent, robust and widespread kinds of life could exist in other, better-tuned universes. You are Douglas Adams’s puddle of water, which thinks it is special because the hole it fills matches its shape so exactly.
Back on topic, all an hour with commercial breaks could possibly do to summarize thousands of years of science is to suggest a few main ideas: the negative energy embodied by space with a gravity field (which I first read about in Dr. Guth’s “The Inflationary Universe” many years ago, but have not heard much of since, and which Dr. Carroll seems to have some reservations about), the uncausal nature of quantum mechanics (the best example which most people would be familiar with, it seems to me, is the radioactive decay of an unstable nucleus, which happens with a probability distribution but no known trigger), virtual particle creation in a vacuum, and the lack of time and space at a singularity (which Dr. Carroll points out is not precisely understood due to the lack of an accepted theory of quantum gravity).
These do not amount to overwhelming proof, even of what I take to be Dr. Hawking’s actual premise, that the laws of nature as we know them are sufficient to explain the creation of this universe, but they are evidence – to those like Dr. Hawking who understand them in detail. If there were vastly more time, the experiments and observations which support them could be explained, but still this will not convince those who wish to believe in a god, however unnecessary that god may be. What convinces me personally, above all, is that the theists have no good evidence on their side, for their god hypothesis, and their defense (aside from those with delusions of hearing god’s voice) consists of the same arguments one could adduce to insist that the existence of Santa Claus cannot be disproved.
And all of that will seem arrogant to them. One always seems arrogant when commenting on foolish behavior of others, but to leave such behavior unremarked also has dangers. All I can say is that I know I have been foolish myself, on many occasions, and I know there are people much smarter than myself, including Dr. Hawking and Dr. Carroll.
Just a brief follow-up, since I see another discredited idea has been presented here in the time it took me to type that last comment, then I will leave the field to others.
Anyone who has a mathematical proof that cells are too complex to have been randomly created through the workings of nature should a) present this proof to any scientific journal and await their Nobel Prize, but b) first watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg
Besides all the Catholic Church bashing and atheistic propaganda espoused by Mr. Hawking’s television program, I do have a big problem with Mr. Hawking’s proposal. Mr. Hawking does not explain why there are laws of nature, nor does he explain why there is a multi-verse to begin with. Essentially, Mr. Hawkings is saying you can’t ask “why” something happened, if there is no time. Consequently, he posits that as there was no “time” in the singularity from which the Big Bang originated, you can’t ask what caused the singularity – it simply came into being – like some quantum particle. Neat trick, but unsatisfying. Mr. Hawkings claims there is no “time” inside a black hole, and yet, “time” can certainly exist outside the blackhole. Indeed, blackholes move through space – and in my opinion motion is the same thing as “time”. If blackholes can move through the galaxy, time exists around the blackhole whether the blackhole likes it or not. Mr. Hawkings does not address the obvious problem with a spontaneously created singularity, that there can be more of them – outside the singularity’s space in a higher dimension where time can exist before the existence of the singularity. I imagine string theorists, who posit the existence of 11 dimensions – are very upset with Mr. Hawkings’ claim, as that would put all of them out of work. I believe Michio Kaku made this objection to Mr. Hawkings’ claim pretty clearly in the program. Also, Mr. Hawkings did not explain how anything that is infinitely dense and infinitely small, such as a singularity, could result in our finite world. Pretty big contradiction there, which he failed to address. It should seem obvious that the multi-verse exists, as there is no reason to believe there could only be one Big Bang, and therefore, there must have been multiple Big Bangs and therefore a multi-verse. Mr. Hawkings’ theory must reject the existence of the multi-verse, and yet, there is very good reason to believe the multi-verse exists. Why are the laws of nature one way, and not another? Simple – there are multi-universes where all the possible laws of nature are tried out. We simply live in the one universe that just so happens to have our particular set of laws. In a multi-verse of infinite possibilities and higher dimensions, who’s to say God does not exist? Mr. Hawkings’ theory is missing the larger picture of higher dimensional space, and therefore, is a grossly incomplete theory.
These types of conversations are a good diversion from real issues facing us like the current status of the economy.
During the panel discussion, you guys touched on the idea that religion and science address different questions, but I wish you has pursued this thread further.
Scholars of comparative religion will tell you that, historically, all religious traditions have served four functions:
1) Cosmological: To present a model of the universe, addressing questions such as “when should I plant my crops?” and “how did we get here?”
2) Sociological: To carry the moral order of a society and affirm a system of values that give a society its structure and tell its members how to participate.
3) Psychological: To help individuals confront the universal challenges of human life, such as maturity, aging, and death.
4) Mystical: To connect individuals to the ultimate mystery of being, namely “is this all there is?” and “why are we here?”
The first two, cosmological and sociological, must vary with the times. For example, science has entirely displaced the clergy on providing useful answers to questions about how the universe works. The fact that religion traditions have not been updated to incorporate a modern understanding of the physical world is what makes them seem, to many, archaic and out of touch.
However, the last two categories are much less sensitive to the times, so the things religion has to say on these issues are as relevant today as they were when the religions were first formed.
Religious people often come across as if they feel that, if science invalidates a cosmological statement made by their religion then that would invalidate the entire religious tradition. That’s a shame, since I believe they end up focusing their energy on defending outdated cosmology, rather than on making the “main message” more accessible.
@ Farhad, yep, everything in teh world is a conspiracy to get people to not think about the economy. <rolling eyes) Got a local columnist who is sure that the focus on getting kids not to be obese is just a conspiracy to ignore the economy too. Seems like anytime someone doesn't like a issue being discussed, someone shrieks "but think of the children".
Sean, thanks for being on the program. Despite the flaws in the show and the panel, it was great to see the ideas discussed. It seemed to me that the simple idea that we no longer rely on gods to explain the trajectory of a tennis ball or to explain an eclipse of the Sun and that we can now extend the same kind of thinking to the origin of the universe was an excellent one.
The brief cut-and-paste format of the panel discussion was disappointing. How nice it would have been to have heard an extended conversation that was on point.
Secondly, it was very difficult to follow the comments made by Haught and, to a lesser extent, Davies. What do they believe?
Finally, the discussion suffered from the premise that the only god under discussion was the Christian god–kind of a cultural chauvinism and a real blind spot in the discussion.
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@JimV–you seem to be taking it too personally that the fact remains that God has neither been proven or disproven. I view it from the absolute sense. If there is no absolute on either side of the argument then there is no absolute solution. Perhaps arguments should be relegated to their individual disciplines.
I stand with the assertion that when we absolutely answer that question we will know everything there is to know and hence there will be no argument–just the peace and happiness that comes from the power of omniscience.
Until then, everyone has a belief and is entitled to it without condemnation and short-sighted (in the absolute sense) judgment.
I see you can tell pretty much how informed people are about Hawking’s ideas by the way they spell his name. It’s not usually the case when people are criticized, but somehow with Hawking (as well as Dawkins and PZ Myers!) it seems to be a common theme.
I’m pretty much in love with you now, Sean. Thank my non-existent God, you were on that panel.
I think Michio Kaku said it best during the program that people will be arguing about whether God exists for the next 1000 years. Obviously, Mr. Kaku did not accept Mr. Hawking’s premise, otherwise, there would be no need for 1000 years of further argument as Mr. Hawking supposedly wrapped it all up last night. Mr. Hawking did not admit the weaknesses in his own argument, made no attempt to point out its difficulties, flaws or uncertainties, as anyone or any scientist committed to the truth would have. Mr. Hawking presents his atheistic view as a scientific certainty, which it most certainly is not, but really only the “opinion” of a man with perhaps an atheistic agenda or an agenda of self-aggrandisement as one of the greatest scientists of all time, or both. His “simplest” explanation for the existence of the universe has holes in it, and therefore, is not an explanation.
Just curious…in his closing remarks, Stephen Hawking stated that for his one life, he is grateful. Umm, in his Godless universe, who is he grateful to?
@ H-Bomb, #129,
I saw the video you linked to.
Ok so the “Big Bang phase” was argued in favor of the Big Bang singularity as being something more to do with reality and what happened at the beginning of our universe. That still doesn’t address the points I mentioned above. Big bang phase or singularity, you still need to explain how it came about, either by using a multiverse that has always existed, or by supposing that the “Big Bang phase” had existed for an infinite amount of time before the Big Bang, inflation, etc. The latter possibility does not make sense because how exactly does the universe spend an infinite amount of time, followed by the Big Bang? How do you traverse an infinite amount of time? So either space and time had a beginning, or there is a multiverse. If space-time had a beginning, it had a beginning from nothing. No natural processes exist in “nothing”, therefore no natural processes can produce a “Big Bang phase” (as she calls it) from nothing. Hence it must be a supernatural cause.
She talks about loop quantum cosmology and how it evades Big Bang singularities. Loop quantum gravity, mind you, has many objections against it from many top physicists. For example, LQG does not incorporate any new degrees of freedom at the Planck scale. It attempts to just quantize pure GR, which will not lead to a consistent theory because one cannot quantize gravity while leaving out all the other forces of nature. There are many more objections against LQG. Just go to some blogs authored by well-known quantum field theorists. They’ll show you the way. So her arguments using LQG are pointless. She shows the cover of a Scientific American magazine as if such a publication means the theory is correct. Scientific American will publish anything if it will sell more issues.
She mentions string theory and something else, but fails to elaborate. Have string theorists been able to explain or calculate the values of the constants we measure in our universe. No. But it does predict a multiverse which allows you to get any kind of universe you want and, therefore, renders string theory an untestable theory since, with a multiverse, you can get anything you want out of the theory. Not to mention the fact that the existence of an infinite number of universes is an untestable idea.
You can form any kind of “model” you want that explains where the Big Bang came from or what happened “before” the big bang, but it doesn’t mean your favorite model has anything to do with reality. Does their “model” follow from a theory of quantum gravity that unifies all the other forces and particle, that has testable predictions? Not that we know of.
She talks about eternal inflation. If eternal inflation happened, there should have been bubble collisions. They looked for signs of bubble collisions in CMB data. They found nothing. It seems to me that this idea of pocket universes has no evidence for its favor and is unobservable. Besides eternal inflation isn’t exactly a requirement for inflation, nor is the traditional model of inflation the only solution to the problems that inspired the idea of inflation in the first place. Nor do we know what the “inflaton” is.
She also showed a snippet of a paper that allegedly shows that the universe could pop out of literally nothing. Literally nothing? OK, so what is the natural mechanism through which a universe can pop out of literally nothing? Quantum mechanical tunelling? But the laws of quantum mechanics (as well as all laws) do not exist in some Platonic realm ready to act. They require something to exist on which to act. And if, somehow, the universe can pop out of literally nothing, why does the universe have the laws that it does and not some other laws, the values of the constants of nature it has and not some other values, or why does the universe have 3 spatial dimensions rather than 2? If the universe popped out of literally nothing, there must be some intelligible law that governed the popping out process. Why that intelligible law rather than some other intelligible law? Who or what came up with this law? All these objections are reasons to regard the idea that a universe can pop out of “literally nothing” are pure nonsense.
There was an interview with Alan Guth in which he mentioned quantum tunelling. Quantum systems can make a discontinuos transition from one state to another. But “literally nothing” is not a quantum mechanical state. If you have nothing, you have no quantum mechanics, no laws, no nothing! If you have literally nothing, why can’t “nothing” be an eigenstate that just evolves to itself: nothing? Arguments like this from Guth make no sense. You can’t use natural laws to describe how “literally nothing” can turn into something! Why is this so difficult to understand? It is as if physicists are so into their work, they think they can apply it to something that makes no sense whatsoever.
For more about how one can have God as a creator, without the need for a creator of God, as well as explanations for other sorts of seeminly impossible characteristics of God, read some famous works by actual theologians and thinkers, not physicists. Physicists are not the only people you should listen to. There are other kinds of thinkers out there. For example, Thomas Aquinas.
So this video shows nothing.
So the moral of the story is that, scientifically, we have no idea what happened. But from nothing comes nothing, hence only something “supernatural” can cause something to come from nothing. As long as that option is still open, there will still be room for a creator.
Does anyone have a link to the panel discussion? I missed it, and I really wanted to see it.
To John @ 167 and others with critiques that Hawking did not present the whole story: This program was only one hour, what can you expect? If you try to explain one thing more clearly, another gets shortened and others get omitted. And maybe your answer is on the cutting room floor [or more literally snoozing on some hard drive]. That’s the director’s fault. That’s why this kind of program is only a taste, you have to make the effort to fill in the gaps.
To Natural Cynic @171, I don’t think the “gaps” in Mr. Hawking’s theory lie on the editor’s floor. Mr. Hawking’s theory is quite simple, really. No time before the Big Bang, therefore, no need to explain what caused the Big Bang. The big problem with his theory is that it does not take the multiverse into account, does not explain why the laws of nature are the way they are, and indeed, makes no attempt to explain why laws of nature even exist. Indeed, his comparison of the universe to a blackhole is even more problematic. We know blackholes exist while “time” itself continues to exist for us. By the very analogy Hawking uses, this suggests a “time” outside the universe in the multiverse or higher dimension. It is also painfully obvious that if a Big Bang could happen once without a cause, it could happen more than once as there is no mechanism to prevent it happening more than once. This, in turn, presupposes a multiverse, which Hawking simply failed to address in this television program. Well, you can’t explain existence without also explaining the multiverse. So, Hawking fails. Hawking could say there is no evidence of a multiverse, and yet, his own theory must admit the possibility of spontaneous creation happening more than once or even multiple times concurrently in a higher dimension which means there must be a multiverse. Accordingly, Hawking’s own theory damns his own theory. If I am missing something, please explain what I am missing. I will not simply believe that Mr. Hawking has some sort of explanation for this dilemma and I should trust that the solution exists. I am sure Mr. Hawking saw this program before it was aired and could’ve made the appropriate corrections before I happened to see it, and therefore, I rather doubt those corrections even exist.
@andyo (#148): “These are mathematically sound (as far as I’ve read from cosmologists) and also falsifiable in principle, if not in practice because of technological barriers.”
Science requires that your claims be falsifiable in practice; otherwise, it’s not science. Full stop. This is precisely the reason that science has been so successful.
“…you’re right that these are hypotheses, but they’re not the same as just believing in ‘god did it’.”
I never said they were. Why are you so concerned with trying to prove that believing what Hawking does about the origin of the universe is better than believing in God?
“And assuming you believe in this god, well, what else does she do besides setting off the big bang? If nothing else after that, then what’s the difference with not believing in her?”
Suppose that scientists were able to prove that parallel universes, which would never affect our lives, existed. Would you still be asking “what’s the difference” then?
@JimV (#156): “If there were vastly more time, the experiments and observations which support them could be explained…”
If only that were true, JimV, if only! But no, there is no more evidence for Hawking’s claim at this point than there is for some of the most speculative parts of string theory.
I don’t really have a problem with Hawking being speculative – hell, if I’m going to follow someone down a rabbit hole, Hawking is probably a better choice than most. I *do* have a problem, however, when such speculation gets presented to a general audience (that lacks the background to make up its own mind) as “science” – which is the way it came across on this show (just look at many of the comments here.)
I don’t have time to address any of the other comments, but I’m a bit confused by the claim that Hawking wrote the script for the episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation.
The production information for the episode, Descent, is of course on-line, and Hawking has no credit for either the story or the teleplay, nor is he mentioned as having contributed towards the content of the episode in the notes.
It’s possible that he was an uncredited contributor, though, since the notes do mention that there was a joke based on technically obscure physics, which he may well have suggested to the writer.
So… I dunno.
Anon #173,
If they were falsifiable in practice right now, they wouldn’t be hypotheses anymore, and we’d know. All science has to pass through this stage, so are you saying it’s not science until the cycle is fully realized? There’s a difference between a scientific hypothesis and “god did it”. You don’t think that being mathematically sound and being in principle falsifiable is different than magic?
It was implied in your message, whether intentional or not. Or else why even mention god in your criticism? Do string theory critics mention a god alternative when they say it’s flawed?
I’m not trying to prove anything, I’m just responding to criticisms brought up by others. Just to be clear: you think that it isn’t better? So, ARE you making an equivalence between Hawking’s hypothesis (and others) with “god did it” or not?
If science were able to “prove” that a non-intervening god set off the big bang, I would be interested. But science isn’t in the business of “proving” magic. The god “hypothesis” is nothing of the sort, it’s not a hypothesis, it’s just an assertion.