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)."

Comments

Re:Where is the water these bubbles came from?

[Remus Shepherd]

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.

Re:hmmm, sorta like God, eh?

[meringuoid]

"What was God doing before He made the world? Was He preparing hell for people who asked such questions?" Now, rediculous stuff comes from the other side as well; but when incredibly smart and esteemed scientists like Hawking make such statements that show an animosity toward and lack of understanding of religion, it might antagonize people.

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.

Re:Try again.

[Skeezix]

The Bible contains all sorts of statements that we now know to be false, in the sense that they contradict all available evidence. The religious respond by going into elaborate contortions to maintain their beliefs (see, for example, "God put the dinosaur fossils there to test us").

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.