So Stephen Hawking IS coming to Canada ... sort of ...

Remember this story - that Hawking would come to Canada? - in July I figured it for a classic "hot weather"* story. Not according to Nature:

The post is a travelling position, which means Hawking can stay on as an emeritus professor at Cambridge while making regular visits to Canada.

A friend says it's because the Perimeter Institute's new director, Neil Turok, knows Hawking reasonably well. Sounds right.

People here could provide Hawking with a short list of months in which he might be best to avoid the PI. (About six of them actually.)

See also:

Space exploration: Stephen Hawking urges, Boldly go ... but why, exactly?

Stephen Hawking, miffed over science funding cuts, to move to Ontario, Canada?

Who reads popular books on cosmology? Well, almost everyone who actually reads, it seems

Study: Sun not special, therefore alien life should be common?

* hot weather story = It runs over the mast because anyone who could stop the nonsense is on vacation. My all-time favourite was when a Los Angeles Angel took out a seagull while he was playing against the Jays here in Toronto - and was charged with cruelty to animals. And, yes, it was July, and yes, it was pretty hot. The charges were later dropped, of course. Meanwhile, the mayor of Los Angeles offered the mayor of Toronto a trainload of seagulls, if we love them so much. Thanks but no thanks, Your Worship. We're not exactly suffering for lack of gulls here either.

Note: The image of Stephen Hawking is from Wikimedia Commons.

Stephen Hawking: Either Star Trek or we are doomed

Here, famous physicist Stephen Hawking writes,

It's time to abandon Earth, warned the world's most famous theoretical physicist.

In an interview with website Big Think , Stephen Hawking warned that the long-term future of the planet is in outer space.

"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet," he said.

"I see great dangers for the human race," Hawking said. "There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. (Fox News, 2010/08/09)

Well, here's what I see. I see that Stephen Hawking needs a cup of tea, a warm blanket, and a nap.

How am I supposed to mediate between, say, Eric Pianka (too many people are dooming us) and Hawking's view that we won't survive unless we move to another planet?

From anything I know, we'd be best to forget the lot of them.

The fact that insane regimes have nuclear arms is certainly a problem, but it is a solvable one.

We used to solve it in the past by not letting them have them.

PS: Hawking actually appeared on Star Trek. Maybe that is why I thought of it.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Cosmology: Wow. It takes guts to wage war with Stephen Hawking ... he appeared in Star Trek

But some dare.

See this review by Michelle Press in Scientific American (October 8, 2008): In The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (Little, Brown, 2008), Leonard Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, recounts the battle over the true nature of black holes that he and Dutch physicist Gerard ’t Hooft have waged with Stephen Hawking:

In 1976 Stephen Hawking imagined throwing a bit of information—a book, a computer, even an elementary particle—into a black hole. Black holes, Hawking believed, were the ultimate traps, and the bit of information would be irretrievably lost to the outside world. This apparently innocent observation was hardly as innocent as it sounds; it threatened to undermine and topple the entire edifice of modern physics. Something was terribly out of whack; the most basic law of nature—the conservation of information—was seriously at risk. To those who paid attention, either Hawking was wrong or the three-hundred-year-old center of physics wasn’t holding....

Okay, now comes the politics:

The Black Hole War was a genuine scientific controversy—nothing like the pseudo-debates over intelligent design, or the existence of global warming. Those phony arguments, cooked up by political manipulators to confuse a naive public, don’t reflect any real scientific differences of opinion. By contrast, the split over black holes was very real.... It was not a war between angry enemies; indeed the main participants are all friends. But it was a fierce intellectual struggle of ideas between people who deeply respected each other but also profoundly disagreed.

Aw, c'mon, Susskind. The public - who must make a living in circumstances more difficult than you can even guess - is not as naive as you imagine. And the hostility belies your claim that you are all "friends." I have so many better friends, I could lend you some for free.

There are lots of reasons for doubting Darwin and Susskind, and accepting a design of life and the universe.

I have not studied global warming, but do wish warming would hurry up. We had another frost warning last night, in Toronto, at latitude 43N. Good thing I never got around to planting the tomatoes ...

We are told:

The conservation of energy appeared first as a mathematical deduction from our models for classical systems but has been incorporated for all of physics. Let us not forget that the conservation of energy was in question in the 30's vis-à-vis beta decay. Bohr and Heisenberg thought that the conservation of energy was violated whereas Pauli, Rutherford and Dirac did not want to part with the conservation of energy.

So no one really knows? Well, we shall see.

Space exploration: Stephen Hawking urges, Boldly go ... but why, exactly?

In "The final frontier," an online feature at Cosmos magazine (24 September 2008), Stephen Hawking, probably the world's best known living cosmologist, argues that we need to take space exploration seriously again:

In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase over an almost unimaginable distance. Yet, the discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old one.

As it happens, a friend writes to say,

People did argue that, and they had good reasons, namely, that it was too far to sail to India. Columbus with some wishful thinking affecting his judgment gave a smaller circumference for the Earth. Lucky for him, North America turned out to exist. He wouldn't have been able to reach India. So Columbus's critics were right about India and the size of the Earth, but Columbus got lucky.

He advises us to read J. B. Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, which points out that

Neither Christopher Columbus, nor his contemporaries, believed the earth was flat. Yet this curious illusion persists today, firmly established with the help of the media, textbooks, teachers--even noted historians. Inventing the Flat Earth is Jeffrey Burton Russell's attempt to set the record straight. He begins with a discussion of geographical knowledge in the Middle Ages, examining what Columbus and his contemporaries actually did believe, and then moves to a look at how the error was first propagated in the 1820s and 1830s--including how noted writers Washington Irving and Antoinne-Jean Letronne were among those responsible. He shows how later day historians followed these original mistakes, and how this "snowball effect" grew to outrageous proportions in the late nineteenth century, when Christians opposed to Darwinism were labelled as similar to Medieval Christians who (allegedly) thought the earth was flat. But perhaps the most intriguing focus of the book is the reason why we allow this error to persist. Do we prefer to languish in a comfortable and familiar error rather than exert the effort necessary to discover the truth? This uncomfortable question is engagingly answered, and includes a discussion about the implications of this for historical knowledge and scholarly honesty. (Product Description)

For the record, Columbus is one of those figures whose historical significance was accidental, which makes him ideal for myth-building. Many penniless adventurers like him washed up or drowned somewhere. He washed up in the Caribbean, and did not even know where he was - thus famously bequeathing the name "Indians" to the earliest known inhabitants of two great continents and all their surrounding islands.

The confusion Columbus accidentally created thereby lives on long after him. For example, today we have many Canadians of Aboriginal descent who resent being called "Indians" and many South Asian-born Canadians who really are from India. So Hawking's choice of Columbus to make his point was not altogether happy. Goodbye, Columbus.

Why go boldly into outer space? To explore inner space perhaps ...

Hawking's main point is to encourage more money for space exploration, specifically bases on the Moon and Mars:

Going into space won't be cheap, certainly, but it will take only a small proportion of world resources. NASA's budget has remained roughly constant in real terms since the time of the Apollo landings, but it has decreased from 0.3 per cent of U.S. GDP in 1970 to 0.12 per cent today.

Even if we were to increase the amount spent on space endeavours internationally by 20 times, to make a serious effort to send people into space, it would only be a small fraction of world GDP.

There will be those who argue that it would be better to spend our money solving the problems of this planet, like climate change and pollution, rather than wasting it on a possibly fruitless search for a new planet. I am not denying the importance of fighting climate change and global warming, but we can do that and still spare a quarter of a per cent of world GDP for space. Isn't our future worth a quarter of percent?

This argument sparked a lively discussion among friends. Is the analogy of space exploration with Europeans colonizing the Americas a fair one? Not really. The Europeans were looking for a quicker, cheaper, and safer route to India, a civilization with which they already had dealings. They already knew what luxury items they hoped to buy there. If space exploration were like that, we would now be trying to improve exchanges with an extraterrestrial civilization with which we already have fruitful contacts.

The fact that the Americas blocked the western route to India was a surprise discovery for the European explorers, but not a remarkable one. Other inhabited continents on a very life-friendly planet are nowhere near the odds of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. For these reasons, the analogy to early modern European explorers does not really work.

However, a friend comments that the techniques developed for space exploration can be put to other uses:

It has been nearly 40 years from our original venture into space and moon landing and we are still reaping many benefits from the event. Most of the discoveries and applications were huge and largely unexpected. For example integrated circuit technology, biotelemetry monitoring, national defense and communication were forever changed as a result of our successfully putting a man on the moon. No doubt even larger technological breakthroughs will be made from learning how to accomplish deeper space travel and colonization of other worlds.

So instead of finding new continents, we will be founding new technology. In that case, the real purpose of the venture is to explore inner space (our own creativity) rather than outer space. On these lines, another friend, Edward Sisson, points to the spiritual value of such an exercise:

Colonizing other planets is basically the same as building a glorified space station. And what do we really do with that? All that effort so that two or three people at a time can spend a few months cramped in a can doing make-work.

The only real benefit of space travel is for mankind to exercise its collective mind accomplishing a worthy challenge. That is, in fact, a worthy reason to do it. But that is no justification for pretending that other benefits are likely.

We will now recite the Creed: "We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth."

In his article, Hawking also sums up current thinking about the origin of life, for which he hopes that space exploration will provide an explanation. In its own way, his comments are most illuminating. Not illuminating about the origin of life but about current thinking, for example:

We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth. So it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy.

But we don't know how life first appeared. The probability of something as complicated as a DNA molecule being formed by random collisions of atoms in ocean seems incredibly small. However, there might have been some simpler macromolecule which was a building block for DNA or another molecule capable of reproducing itself.

Honestly, I've heard all this before, and I am not sure I would want to invest .25% of Earth's resources in it.

Panspermia, or an unidentified factor or force?

Hawking also gives a plug for panspermia, the theory that life originated elsewhere in the universe, and some other unexplained factor:

One piece of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing is that we have fossils from 3.5 billion years ago. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half-billion years or so. So life appeared on Earth within half-a-billion years of it being possible, which is short compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of an Earth-like planet.

This fact would suggest either panspermia or that the probability of life appearing independently is reasonably high. If it the probability very low, one would have expected it to take most of the 10 billion years available.

I am not sure what Hawking means by his suggested alternative to panspermia, that "the probability of life appearing independently is reasonably high." If so, something currently unknown must be driving it, because the probability is obviously not "reasonably high" if we assume random assembly, a fact that Hawking admits himself. Perhaps in his next essay, he will outline what he thinks that factor might be.

Were we meant to explore the universe?

Personally, I think that Guillermo Gonzalez's view that Earth's favourable position for astronomy suggests that we are somehow meant to explore the universe is far more inspirational for raising the required .25% of world GNP than anything Hawking cites in his article. After all, if we were meant to explore our universe, we can be sure that we will find something of consequence out there. Otherwise, maybe not. And the "otherwise" seems much closer to Hawking's position. And, after all, it is a lot of money.

Too bad Gonzalez's position proved so costly, and Hawking's position is so rewarding. Hawking worries in the article that young people are turned off science today. That, at least, should not be a mystery.

See also:

On Hawking

Stephen Hawking, miffed over science funding cuts, to move to Ontario, Canada?

Who reads popular books on cosmology? Well, almost everyone who actually reads, it seems

On Gonzalez

The truth hurts - and it can leave you seeing stars too

"Privileged planet" astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez: Dissing St. Carl Sagan in his own church

Study: Sun not special, therefore alien life should be common?

Hawking and Mlodinow: Firing God and hiring the multiverse

British physicist David Tyler comments:

Stephen Hawking has achieved the status of 'celebrity scientist'. He writes books that sell well and has both presented and performed in television series.

His latest book, The Grand Design, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, has been reviewed widely by both popular press and scientific journals. According to Michael Turner, who wrote the Nature review, these authors:

"offer a brief but thrilling account of some of the boldest ideas in physics - including M-theory and the multiverse - and what these have to say about our existence and the nature of the Universe."

The media appeared to be stimulated primarily by the claim that physics has made God redundant. "God is unnecessary, science can explain the universe without the need for a creator" (BBC News), "Why God Did Not Create the Universe. There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world - no gods required." (Wall Street Journal). The Guardian responded by conducting a poll among its readers, asking the question:

"Is physicist Stephen Hawking right that physics, not God, created the universe?" This theme is also picked out in the Nature review: "No miracle in the Multiverse". Some might find the argument to be artificially polarised - for did not the pioneers of science link the existence of laws of nature with the reality of a supreme Lawgiver? More recent research has unearthed evidence for the "fine-tuning" of the Cosmos, so the evidences of design have become more prominent with time. Hawking and Mlodinow recognise this when they write:

"Newton believed that our strangely habitable solar system did not "arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature." Instead, he maintained that the order in the universe was "created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition." The discovery recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that this grand design is the work of some grand Designer."

This brings us to the heart of the argument presented by Hawking and Mlodinow: they are endorsing M-theory and the Multiverse cosmological model. This is how Turner puts it:

"In searching for the holy grail, Hawking and others pinned their hopes first on super-gravity and then on string theory. Both are now seen as different regimes of a grander mathematical framework called M-theory, where M is yet to be determined - is it master, miracle or mirage? M-theory unifies gravity with the other fundamental forces (weak and strong nuclear and electromagnetism), predicts seven additional dimensions of space and suggests that space and time might be emergent phenomena rather than fundamental. It is exciting and important, but much of it remains to be explored."

For more, go here.

The black hole: Does it or doesn't it destroy information?

Here John Johnson Jr. interviews Stanford's Leonard Susskind, whose claim to fame is that he is Stephen "black hole" Hawking's nemesis (Los Angeles Times. July 26, 2008). Susskind has printed Hawking's letter conceding that information is not necessarily lost in a black hole:

I was a particle physicist when I was invited to an event at Werner Erhard's house in 1981. Erhard [founder of the est self-awareness movement] admired scientists and liked to listen to them debate. At one of his events, I met Stephen Hawking. Stephen discovered an amazing fact, which is that black holes evaporate. It's like a puddle of water out in the sun.

Susskind thinks that was wrong.

It violates one of the fundamental principles of physics, which says nothing is ever lost completely. You may say, "How can you say information isn't lost? I can erase information on my computer." But every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form.

I am not sure what that means. If information is horribly scrambled and confused, it isn't just converted to a different form, it can be basically lost.

If I told you that my late cat's name was &*&^^%**!, how would that help you figure out what the cat's name was, without any regular encoding/decoding system in place?

Something about all this doesn't make sense, and I am not surprised to learn that Susskind is one of many anti-intelligent design folk who would love to believe there is a zillion universes (so absolutely anything could be true about our universe and it wouldn't prove anything, right?):

Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have argued that multiple universes could have formed during a period of cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang. More recently, string theorists have calculated that there could be 10 [to the]500 universes, which is more than the number of atoms in our observable Universe. Under these circumstances, it becomes more reasonable to assume that several would turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and zillions of darts to throw at the dart board, Susskind says. “Surely, a large number of them are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of course, we exist in our particular Universe because we couldn’t exist anywhere else. It’s an intriguing idea with just one problem, says Gross: “It’s impossible to disprove.” Because our Universe is, almost by definition, everything we can observe, there are no apparent measurements that would confirm whether we exist within a cosmic landscape of multiple universes, or if ours is the only one. And because we can’t falsify the idea, Gross says, it isn’t science. (Geoff Brumfiel, "Outrageous Fortune," Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006).)

[ ... ]

Susskind, too, finds it “deeply, deeply troubling” that there’s no way to test the principle. But he is not yet ready to rule it out completely. “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science,” he says. (Geoff Brumfiel, "Outrageous Fortune," Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006)

Notice he says that about the multiverse, but not about intelligent design of our universe - for which we have evidence.

Note: I seem to recall a Canadian physicist once telling m that Hawking had admitted the same thing to him too. Maybe he should have got a letter ...

Stephen Hawking, miffed over science funding cuts, to move to Ontario, Canada?

According to Chris Wattie, in the National Post (July 15, 2008), Hawking is looking seriously at the offer to move to Canada after attacking the British government for cuts to scientific funding he has called "disastrous."

Dr. Stephen Hawking, the award-winning author of A Brief History of Time, is reportedly considering leaving Britain's Cambridge University, after almost 50 years of ground-breaking work there on theoretical physics, in favour of the Perimeter Institute, founded by the Canadian owners of high-tech firm Research in Motion Ltd.

Others deny it, and I'm calling it a hot weather story for now ... Anyway, send this out on your Blackberries ...

(Note: The image is from NASA.)

Who reads popular books on cosmology? Well, almost everyone who actually reads, it seems

But it can be hard to convince publishers of that fact. Says Lucy Hawking (yes, daughter of Stephen) in the Sunday Times (June 14, 2008), reflecting on the popularity of good science writing with the book-buying public:

Possibilities for disaster were clearly on the mind of the publishers who offered my father Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a contract without an advance for his first popular book, A Brief History of Time. Published in the end by a different house, the book went on to defy all those who thought the public would not be interested in a work explaining the advances of modern physics in terms anyone could understand.

A Brief History of Time became a runaway bestseller in more than 40 languages, spent 224 weeks on the bestseller list and celebrates its 20th anniversary - still in print - this week. It is another great work in which a scientist's imagination has played a key role.

Meanwhile, Lucy Hawking and her father have written a book, George's Secret Key to the Universe, aimed primarily at children. An excerpt is available at the site.

So who cares abut cosmology?

Lots of people do not read much of anything. Recently, someone solemnly apprised me that he thought that Mario Beauregard's and my book, The Spiritual Brain would be "difficult" and he had warned a bunch of people about that. Gee, thanks, fella.

Actually, The Spiritual Brain is pitched to the reading level of a typical Canadian daily newspaper, so it was all I could do to keep from snapping,

Yes, it's difficult - if your regular reading is the bubble gum funnies.

Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut ...

But many people do read, and as Lucy Hawking's article shows, cosmology - well written - is a perennial favourite. Adults who read popular science should not be presumed to have only the level of sophistication of the last year in which they formally studied science. Many people learn a lot on the job or through private reading, and those who do enjoy a challenge.

Big Bang exploded? Seriously, is there room for reasonable skepticism about the Big Bang?

Agnostic retired Australian political science prof Hiram Caton has been tackling the huge industry of pious legends and ridiculous reverence around Charles Darwin.

I also happened to mention to him the frothier bits of speculation about the multiverse, and he replied,

Your comments and criticisms of the 'multiverse' speculation are well taken; basically it's gibberish. That peer review journals publish this stuff is a stark statement of the fallibility of scientists. Admittedly, the atheist do-gooders have a problem with the prevailing Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe: it looks like creation ex nihilo! The theory was first advanced by Father Georges Lamaitre in 1927 and was endrosed by Pope Pius XI in 1952. So Dawkins types understandably find it a bit embarrassing.

But, he notes,

There's an alternative to the Big Bang--the steady state theory, for which there's extensive empirical evidence. The steady state is rather more amenable to their position than the Big Bang, yet as far as I know they never discuss it. Maybe they don't know about it.

Steady State theory (= the universe has always existed) was - as Stephen Hawking pointed out, a good theory. For one thing it could be falsified by evidence, and the official story is that it was (see below). That compares pretty favourably with the many mere speculations that seem to dominate cosmological discussions these days.

Here's Caton's page on Steady State theory. He grumbles, "NASA's more ideology infected than the American Medical Association, which is pretty far gone."

Come to think of it, agnostic mathematician David Berlinski has also published a skeptical look at Big Bang theory.

Berlinski is skeptical of a lot of cosmology these days. Here is one of his comments from his interview with The Observer's Ron Rosenbaum (June 7, 1998)

Speaking of the knee-jerk acceptance by trade book publishers of every faddish cosmological theory in the aftermath of Stephen Hawking's success with A Brief History of Time , he said, "A lot of stuff that gets into print is simply nonsensical. Alan Guth's derivation of something from nothing [in The Inflationary Universe ] is simply incandescent horseshit . Don't tell me you're deriving something from nothing when it's transparently obvious to any mathematician that this is incandescent nonsense."

Yes, it's old, but Berlinski's recent The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions enlarges on the theme.

Like most traditional Christians, I am partial to Big Bang theory because it backs up a theist's intuitions about the universe. one evangelistic ministry aimed at the science-minded, for example, uses the Big Bang is a central apologetic device. But that is precisely the reason people like me need to stay in touch with reasonable skepticism about it.

Here's a bit of what I wrote about it in By Design or by Chance?:

The story goes that Hoyle and two other physicists, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, went out one night in Cambridge in1946 to see a horror movie. It was one of those movies with a circular plot so the final scene is the same as the opening scene. Later that night, over glasses of brandy in Bondi’s apartment, the physicists were inspired to wonder if the universe is really like that movie. The end is just replaced by the beginning, over and over again.

In 1948, in a bold move, they proposed a new theory, the Steady State universe. They began by noting that the best evidence for the Big Bang is the fact that the universe is expanding. Most scientists assume that the universe is expanding from its own origin in a single point, as Lemaître had said.

However, Hoyle’s team argued, suppose the universe is expanding a little bit at a time, from everywhere at once? Perhaps hydrogen atoms, the simplest ones, can come into existence all by themselves by spontaneous generation. Just a few here and there, maybe one particle per cubic kilometre per year.9 It would add up, they said. The galaxies move apart because the new atoms shove other matter aside, and create an expanding—but still eternal—universe.

So . . . not with a Bang, but with a whimper, the universe leaks into existence.

Such a small whimper of creation eludes strict bookkeeping. To sticklers who demanded to know where all the individual newborn hydrogen atoms were coming from, the Steady State physicists replied with a question of their own: Is spontaneous creation of single atoms a bigger mystery than a Big Bang, according to which the whole universe comes into existence suddenly from nothing? So on either side there is a mystery. But which mystery is the real one?

And which is just a good plot device for a science fiction movie? That was the question they were posing.

Much later:

The Envelope, Please . . .

In the study that tested the two theories, the Big Bang predicted the correct amount of helium—about 25 percent—but the Steady State was way off.

In Hoyle’s own words:

Our results, together with further developments by William Fowler, Robert Wagoner and myself, became what even to this day is pretty well the strongest evidence for the big bang, particularly as the arguments were produced by members of what was seen as the steady state camp.

That did not stop Hoyle, who stubbornly continued to search for a No Bang theory to the end of his life. Most scientists respected him for his stubbornness, as was evident in the many eulogies written at the time of his death in 2001.17 Because he needed to find a source for atoms other than the Big Bang, he ended up doing important research on the way in which heavier elements are produced inside stars.

Find out the real reasons why there is an intelligent design controversy and why it doesn't and can't just go away:

Influential atheist cosmologists, and why they might not matter

On a recent list of the 25 most influential atheists, three key cosmologists come up.

# 5 Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is one of the world’s great theoretical physicists. His trade-press book A Brief History of Time took the world by storm in the late 1980s. In it he raised the prospect of a self-creating universe, which he has since developed at length. The theme he keeps pounding is the extraneousness of the God hypothesis.

Wrote a bit about him. With his new take on M-theory, he is now mainly famous for staying famous. But that’s still pretty famous.

# 9 Steven Weinberg

The premier living Nobel laureate physicist, Steven Weinberg is one of the great scientists of our time. He is also a remarkably good writer, as demonstrated in his popular books on physics, which advance an atheistic view of the universe. According to him, science’s greatest cultural achievement is to eradicate religion.

Never tracked him much. His “pointless” universe seems like too much religion in science class to me (and he now admits it was a foolish thing to say).

He’s right. Just because he has religion on the brain ... Don’t bet on his fellow atheists making an issue out of whether other religions get equal treatment with his in tax-funded schools.

# 11 Lawrence Krauss

When the television networks need a well-credentialed and well-spoken scientist to discuss the relation between science and religion, Lawrence Krauss is their man.* A physicist with solid credentials as well as a ready pen, who has written a string of successful popular science books, Krauss has effectively used this platform to promote atheism.

Clashed with him, actually. I disagreed that sci fi film makers created a big problem by using unrealistic physics. Hello? That’s why it’s called science fiction.

Well you should have heard him in response ...

(*Now that sounds to me like damning with faint praise, but I digress.)

It all raises an interesting question: What would cosmology look like if there wasn’t an obsessive need to come up with a cosmology that bypasses a beginning, which suggests an argument for the existence of God?

Today’s cosmology strikes me as a carnival of improbable ideas festooned with equations.

Look, when  physicists concentrate on physics, I don’t know near enough to critique it. These guys make my job easy, that’s for sure. With luck, I'll get a book out of it.

Hawking’s Grand Design: See, one icon is ALLOWED to diss another

Good thing, too.

After the breathless praise we’ve heard so far, The Economist review of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,’s The Grand Design is hardly the birthday cake I’d come to expect:

The problem is not that the book is technically rigorous—like “A Brief History of Time”, it has no formulae—but because whenever the going threatens to get tough, the authors retreat into hand-waving, and move briskly on to the next awe-inspiring notion. Anyone who can follow their closing paragraphs on the relation between negative gravitational energy and the creation of the universe probably knows it all already. This is physics by sound-bite.


[ ... ]


The main novelty in “The Grand Design” is the authors’ application of a way of interpreting quantum mechanics, derived from the ideas of the late Richard Feynman, to the universe as a whole. According to this way of thinking, “the universe does not have just a single existence or history, but rather every possible version of the universe exists simultaneously.” The authors also assert that the world’s past did not unfold of its own accord, but that “we create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.” They say that these surprising ideas have passed every experimental test to which they have been put, but that is misleading in a way that is unfortunately typical of the authors. It is the bare bones of quantum mechanics that have proved to be consistent with what is presently known of the subatomic world. The authors’ interpretations and extrapolations of it have not been subjected to any decisive tests, and it is not clear that they ever could be.


Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think.

What chance mathematician David Berlinski wrote this?

Why cosmologists should avoid being armchair philosophers

Is it just my imagination or a recent development that reviewers of books like Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design are starting to ask some hard questions about materialist science parading as philosophy or theology?
Michael Turner, for Nature,says the authors

offer a brief but thrilling account of some of the boldest ideas in physics—including M-theory and the multiverse—and what these have to say about our existence and the nature of the Universe.” Turner continues: “In searching for the holy grail, Hawking and others pinned their hopes first on super-gravity and then on string theory. Both are now seen as different regimes of a grander mathematical framework called M-theory, where M is yet to be determined—is it master, miracle or mirage?

When they’re riffing off C. S. Lewis’s question about Jesus, “lunatic, liar, or Lord?” you can be sure they’re not taking you seriously.

Plus, The Economist sniffed,

It is hard to evaluate their case against recent philosophy, because the only subsequent mention of it, after the announcement of its death, is, rather oddly, an approving reference to a philosopher’s analysis of the concept of a law of nature, which, they say, “is a more subtle question than one may at first think.” There are actually rather a lot of questions that are more subtle than the authors think. It soon becomes evident that Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles.

Yes indeed. One can’t trash philosophy and then expect to score points by employing it.

But then maybe the entire universe is just a wave function . . .

Stephen Hawking has tried his hand at designing a design-free universe, as well. In A Brief History of Time, he suggests:

So long as the universe had a beginning, we would suppose it had a creator (the cosmological argument). But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

How can the universe both be finite and have no boundary? To make this work, Hawking relies on imaginary time, rather than real time. Chemists sometimes use the concept of time measured in imaginary numbers, such as the square root of minus 2, in order to solve equations. He pictures the universe in imaginary time as being like a wave, with no one point that is the beginning. The problem here is the reality check. When chemists use imaginary time to solve equations, they always have to convert back to real values. Once we get back to real time, the universe does have a beginning.

Hawking acknowledges this, saying that “when one goes back to the real time in which we live, however, there will still appear to be singularities.” In other words, a beginning. He suggests:

In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.

So … what we call real is “just an idea we invent”? That is a leap of faith, a very different leap of faith from the belief that there is a God whose existence guarantees that what we observe in science experiments, however strange, is real and is happening. Which leap makes more sense for science?

From By Design or by Chance?, page 37.

Materialism strikes back: We create the universe, not God?

In "Why it isn't as simple as God vs. the multiverse", Amanda Gefter (December 4, 2008) who seems determined to turn Britain's New Scientist into the "National Enquirer" of pop science mags, advises that

Pitting the multiverse against religion presents a false dichotomy. Science never boils down to a choice between two alternative explanations. It is always plausible that both are wrong and a third or fourth or fifth will turn out to be correct.

What might a third option look like here? Physicist John Wheeler once offered a suggestion: maybe we should approach cosmic fine-tuning not as a problem but as a clue. Perhaps it is evidence that we somehow endow the universe with certain features by the mere act of observation. It's an idea that Stephen Hawking has been thinking about, too. Hawking advocates what he calls top-down cosmology, in which observers are creating the universe and its entire history right now. If we in some sense create the universe, it is not surprising that the universe is well suited to us.

Well, that's a pretty remarkable idea: We create the universe?

Okay. Let's take a deep breath and think about what this means:

1. The mind is real, and it causes things to happen? So, let me get this straight: The mind is not an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in the brain. Not only is the mind not an illusion, but it actually creates the universe. Wowza! Has anyone told the folk at The Edge this?

Or more to the point, has anyone told their literary agents? Is there some way of getting back huge advances offered for hard line materialist works? Naw, I thought not.

2. The obvious reason that we do not, in isolation, create the universe is this: Many of our fellow humans would not intentionally create the circumstances they endure. As co-author of The Spiritual Brain, I would be the last person to deny the causal powers of the human mind. But clearly, other factors are in play with respect to how the universe works out.

It is becoming harder and harder to deny design in the universe.

No boundaries? Or no possibility?

A friend commented on Stephen Hawking's "no boundary" proposal:

The no boundary proposal means that one can picture the origin of the universe as being like the formation of bubbles of steam in boiling water. Quantum fluctuations lead to the spontaneous creation of tiny universes out of nothing.

My friend points out that it is not really 'out of nothing' as Hawking states. Quantum fluctuations require some sort of space-time and energy, even if they different from our own. So we've only traded one problem (get rid of the idea of a beginning) for another (what caused the space-time and energy that gave rise to the tiny universes?).

Basically, something isn't nothing. And nothing comes of nothing.

By the way, here are some varying definitions of "nothing", as seen by a physicist.

Astronomer vs. pop science TV

Here's my review of Hugh Ross's Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (Baker, 2008). It was originally written for a Christian news magazine but, due to a mixup, someone else had published a review first. So I thought I may as well put it up here. Also, below the review, I have placed some selections from the book in earlier posts put up here:

Canadian-born astronomer Hugh Ross reminds us that Stephen Hawking said, in his all time science bestseller A Brief History of Time: “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”

But Hawking, along with a great many other cosmologists, then devoted his career to attempting to explain it all away. The resulting efforts—including speculations about hypothetical other universes—are widely reported, not because they are very convincing but because their anti-theistic assumptions are part and parcel of the current understanding of science.

Ross begs to differ. His book consists of two parts: Why does the universe show the puzzling features that it does, and how can we integrate a Biblical explanation with a scientific one? He recounts that he became a Christian as a young adult after a skeptical study of the Bible (and other “holy books”) convinced him that “no human mind or collection of minds alone could have produced the sixty-six books of the Bible. These books contained information their writers couldn’t have known and concepts they couldn’t have begun to imagine apart from supernatural inspiration.” Now this is a daring claim, one I will leave to scholars. At any rate, the experience started him on the path to founding Reasons to Believe, a Pasadena, California-based ministry aimed at scientists, based largely on insights from astronomy, physics, and more recently, biology.

Ross patiently explains why the universe is so big and so old—because life as we know it could not otherwise exist. Of course, a skeptic might reply that God could have ordained things differently. But the skeptic is never asked to explain how, exactly; skepticism is apparently a full time job. Curiously, Earth is also in the darkest location in the galaxy and therefore the best for observing the heavens). Ross joins many theistic astronomers in taking this as a sign that humans were meant to explore the universe.

So far so good. But then, in the latter half of the book, Ross turns to the Scriptures and I become uneasy. Let me begin by positioning myself as far as possible from one popular brand of “theistic evolution,” according to which evidence for God in nature is suspect “because one day science might find a reason for all that, and then what will become of your faith?”

Let me be clear: Science has found a reason for fine tuning: It is necessary for life. Further delving into the universe is likely to uncover still more such evidence. Fine tuning is also precisely what the Scriptures tell us to expect when they constantly praise God’s “handiwork.” The only alternatives are to say that human reason is meaningless or that there might be a zillion flopped universes out there (and many pundits do say these things). But these alternatives do not recommend themselves easily to a reasoning mind.

My uneasiness stems from the fact that Ross, taking a literalist approach to Scripture, tries to understand subjects like the New Jerusalem in terms of physics. It’s interesting, yes, but alarmingly trite. I think that Paul’s approach— "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9 NIV)—is wiser in the long run. Paul and other Christian mystics usually cannot describe authentic visions of the world to come, as I learned while working on The Spiritual Brain. (See especially 2 Cor 12:2-4, where Paul makes that explicit.)

It’s not a question of preferring faith to science. We simply cannot speak intelligibly of the world to come, even if we are sure that it exists, for the same reasons that we cannot speak intelligibly of an eleven-dimensional structure, even if we are sure that it exists. We do not have language for it.

Those cautions aside, Why the Universe Is the Way It Is is a must-read for intelligent Christians and an excellent antidote to the “lost in the universe” nonsense that dominates pop science TV.

Some selections of interest from the book:

Why some self-proclaimed skeptics need a universal swivel joint in their necks ...

The nothingness of nothing as seen by scientists

Does our solar system occupy a unique position in the universe or just an ordinary one?

Extraterrestrials: Several million UFO reports later, the state of the question

More "who takes this multiverse stuff seriously?" stories here:

Cosmology: If you needn't worry about paying the rent Friday, you can worry aboutthis stuff

Cosmology: Science's leader in things that don't make sense

Cosmology: Crisis of the month: gravitation

Cosmology: Multiverse - getting comfortable with a zillion of everything that is unique.

Cosmology: I seem to have yanked particle physicist Lawrence Krauss's chain

Cosmology: Wow. It takes guts to wage warwith Stephen Hawking. He appeared in Star Trek

Cosmology: Arguments against flatness (plus exposing sloppy science writing)

Cosmology: If the universe has free will, where do I go to file a claim for damages?

Multiverse: Recent studies suggest that some alternative universes "may not be so inhospitable" - assuming they exist

In "Looking for Life in the Multiverse: Universes with different physical laws might still be habitable" Scientific American Magazine (December 16, 2009) By Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez make clear what is and is not accepted in science (as they understand it) and why:

The laws of physics-and in particular the constants of nature that enter into those laws, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces-might therefore seem finely tuned to make our existence possible. Short of invoking a supernatural explanation, which would be by definition outside the scope of science, a number of physicists and cosmologists began in the1970s to try solving the puzzle by hypothesizing that our universe is just one of many existing universes, each with its own laws. According to this"anthropic" reasoning, we might just occupy the rare universe where the right conditions happen to have come together to make life possible. Amazingly, the prevailing theory in modern cosmology, which emerged in the1980s, suggests that such "parallel universes" may really exist-in fact, that a multitude of universes would incessantly pop out of a primordial vacuum the way ours did in the big bang. Our universe would be but one of many pocket universes within a wider expanse called the multiverse. In the overwhelming majority of those universes, the laws of physics might not allow the formation of matter as we know it or of galaxies, stars, planets and life. But given the sheer number of possibilities, nature would have had a good chance to get the "right" set of laws at least once. Our recent studies, however, suggest that some of these other universes-assuming they exist-may not be so inhospitable after all. Remarkably, we have found examples of alternative values of the fundamental constants, and thus of alternative sets of physical laws, that might still lead to very interesting worlds and perhaps to life. The basic idea is to change one aspect of the laws of nature and then make compensatory changes to other aspects.

Our work did not address the most serious fine-tuning problem in theoretical physics: the smallness of the "cosmological constant," thanks to which our universe neither recollapsed into nothingness a fraction of a second after the big bang, nor was ripped part by an exponentially accelerating expansion. Nevertheless, the examples of alternative, potentially habitable universes raise interesting questions and motivate further research into how unique our own universe might be.

Well, the supernatural may be "outside the scope of science," but universes whose existence is not demonstrated, which are imagined principally to get out of a jam with the evidence from this universe, are reasonably doubted, despite thought experiments. The tentative tone here is well justified. It should be used more often.

See other multiverse and fine tuning stories:

Multiverse:

Cosmology: If you needn't worry about paying the rent Friday, you can worry about this stuff

Cosmology: Science's leader in things that don't make sense

Cosmology: Crisis of the month: gravitation

Cosmology: Multiverse - getting comfortable with a zillion of everything that is unique.

Cosmology: I seem to have yanked particle physicist Lawrence Krauss's chain

Cosmology: Wow. It takes guts to wage warwith Stephen Hawking. He appeared in Star Trek

Cosmology: Arguments against flatness (plus exposing sloppy science writing)

Cosmology: If the universe has free will, where do I go to file a claim for damages?

Fine tuning:

New podcasts on fine tuning of the universe

Also: Gravity doesn't make sense? Hold on to that thought!

Multiverse: Getting comfortable with a zillion of everything that is unique?

Can the laws of physics evolve?

Like clouds in our coffee, all these other universes

Major media, imagining themselves sober, think there are many universes, not just double vision

The Big Bang exploded; seriously, is there room for reasonable skepticism about the Big Bang?

Could God live in an infinite sea of universes? It depends.

Will the cosmic multiverse landscape ensure the triumph of intelligent design?

Now, remind me again why we need multiverse theory in the first place?

Multiverse theory: Replacing the big fix with the sure thing?

To be fine tuned for life, the universe should have been tuned differently?

At Slashdot “News for Nerds.Stuff that Matters” we learn:

eldavojohn writes
"A common argument one might encounter in intelligent design or the arduous process of resolving science with religion is that the physical constants of our world are fine tuned for life by some creator or designer. A University of Alberta theoretical physicist claims quite the opposite when it comes to the cosmological constant. His paper says that our ever expanding universe has a positive cosmological constant and he explains that the optimum cosmological constant for maximizing the chances of life in the universe would be slightly negative: 'any positive value of the constant would tend to decrease the fraction of matter that forms into galaxies, reducing the amount available for life. Therefore the measured value of the cosmological constant, which is positive, is evidence against the idea that the constants have been fine-tuned for life.'" [Links at site.]

Well, when we find a good many of Stephen Hawking’s other universes, we can see whether any are negatively constanted, and if so, whether they have more life.

Cosmology: If you needn't worry about paying the rent Friday, you can worry about this stuff

In "Seven questions that keep physicists up at night" (New Scientist, 23 October 2009) Ivan Semeniuk reports from the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario:

Here are the seven questions:

1. Why this universe?

2. What is everything made of?

... But the discovery of dark energy, which appears to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, has created a vast new set of puzzles for which there are no immediate answers in sight. This includes the nature of the dark energy itself and the question of why it has a value that is so extraordinarily small, allowing for the formation of galaxies, stars and the emergence of life.

3. How does complexity happen?

4. Will string theory ever be proved correct?

5. What is the singularity?

6. What is reality really?

7. How far can physics take us?

It strikes me that these questions vary in levels of worth. How complexity happens (3) is an important puzzle; whether string theory is ever proved correct is of interest only to string theorists and skeptics (4). As to how far physics can take us (7), I am not Madam Rosa the psychic, so do not pretend to predict the future.

The "Quantum to Cosmos" festival is online here.

Other cosmology stories at Colliding Universes:

Cosmology: Science's leader in things that don't make sense

Cosmology: Crisis of the month: gravitation

Cosmology: Multiverse - getting comfortable with a zillion of everything that is unique.

Cosmology: I seem to have yanked particle physicist Lawrence Krauss's chain

Cosmology: Wow. It takes guts to wage warwith Stephen Hawking. He appeared in Star Trek

Cosmology: Arguments against flatness (plus exposing sloppy science writing)

Cosmology: If the universe has free will, where do I go to file a claim for damages?

(Note: I wasn't able to keep this blog up recently, due to various projects, but am now back. )