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Stephen Hawking Says Universe Created from Nothing
mr_3ntropy writes "Speaking to a sold out crowd at the Berkeley Physics Oppenheimer Lecture, Hawking said yesterday that he now believes the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. He said more work is needed to prove this but we have time because 'Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.' There is also a Webcast available (Realplayer or Real Alternative required)."
He's making an analogy. A rigorous explanation is beyond the generalized audience he had there. Even those with proper background to understand it would probably have been bored -- they came there to see a scientist celebrity, and Hawkings did not disappoint.
For your enlightenment, the 'water' in question is a series of multidimensional branes, according to one cosmological theory. The universe may have been created when two branes collided, creating turbulence that manifested as a big bang in our dimensional space. These collisions go on all the time, but like the 'bubbles in boiling water' analogy not all the turbulence creates new universes.
Your next question is 'where did the branes come from'? Branes are mathematical concepts. If someone tells you 1+1=2, you can't really ask where '1' came from. If there is a multiverse it has to have some sort of brane structure, in much the same way as if humans exist they have to have skin.
So the universe was 'created by nothing' in a pretty accurate sense, as a mathematical concept is as close to 'nothing' as anyone is likely to conceive. But in the end, Hawkings' words were chosen for showmanship, not precision.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Lack of understanding? He was quoting St. Augustine.
It's a quote he uses a lot. Read a lot of Hawking's speeches and you'll see that he rehashes old material endlessly; it's a hell of a job for him to actually go through the labour of typing out anything new, what with his condition, so he copies and pastes wherever possible from previous works and speeches. Whole paragraphs tend to get copied from Brief History to this day.
The full quote from the book was:
"As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. [Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 8]"
Thus Augustine's idea of time is in full agreement with Hawking's: that time is a function of the universe, so 'before creation' is a meaningless phrase.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The last number I saw, which I don't have an authoritative reference for, said 20-25% of physicists believe in God, compared to ~90% of the general population. The percentage is higher when you consider all scientists, but still, science is not a very religious occupation.
Now, maybe you left out 3 because you're assuming the Big Bang. If so, that's fair enough.
But the claim of every major theistic group I know is #4, not #2. You seem to be aping Dawkins' arguments, with a similar ignorance of the actual set of alternatives. No one claims that the order/complexity/whatever of God just popped into existence. People (Hawking, Dawkins, apparently you) do claim that the order of the physical universe & natural law just popped into existence. If you're going to compare your views to other people's, and if you care about honesty and intellectual integrity, please accurately represent them.
And if you think the distinction I'm making between 2 and 4 is irrelevant or meaningless, keep this in mind: The Big Bang was resisted because people wanted to have a universe that always existed. They could accept an eternal universe; they did not want to have to explain a universe that started to exist. (Of course, we can also suppose an eternal chain of Big Bangs, universes spawning other universes, etc., so the Big Bang doesn't actually settle this question of eternality.) So, those philosophical naturalists thought 3 was more reasonable than 1 for precisely the reason that theists claim 4 is more reasonable than 2.
No, the religious nut-cases do that. They are the ones you always hear about in the media. You don't hear about the millions of reasonable, open-minded religious people who are capable of realizing that the Bible doesn't actually say how old the earth is and Genesis 1 was meant to be poetic rather than a scientific account of how God created the universe.
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