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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)."
So it's a bunch of bullshit. Who cares? In a theocracy, Stephen Hawking would be hauled off to jail for suggesting such blasphemy. Shouldn't we be celebrating the fact that he can openly speculate about origins? Hawking isn't telling you how to live your life, or what to think, or who to vote for, or what to teach your kids, or which supreme court justices deserve to die. He's just sharing his little vision.
To be fair, this cuts both ways (liberal and conservative). I frequently see comments that people assume are antagonistic and feel that the antagonism is in the ears of the, um, belistener.
As someone with a fairly good training in physics, I read this statement to be a commentary on Hawking's annoyance with the question of what came before "time" began. Many religious people have attempted to reconcile the Big Bang with Judeo-Christian beliefs by having God be responsible for the Big Bang. I think that such an allusion should not be taken as necessarily antagonistic.
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Because when it gets down to the highly theoretical stuff like this that no one will ever truly be able to prove, its not much different than religion.
You would be right, if and only if Hawking was talking about things that couldn't ever be proven one way or another. At that point, he wouldn't be doing any sort of physics anymore, he'd be somewhere off in that grey area where it borders philosophy and religion. (I call this area "Wankersville", but that's just me.)
However, there's a difference between something that cannot ever be proved, full stop, and something that can't be proved or disproved right now, due to the limitations of our understanding and our equipment.
There was a time, as recently as a hundred years ago, when debates about whether light was a particle or a wave would have seemed like wanking. However, they were not -- because we now have an (well, at least a partial) answer to that question, it's just that the theoreticians exceeded the reach of the experimentalists for a few centuries. Debates such as those, which get answered eventually by experimental evidence, are wholly different from debates which can never be settled (and, IMO, are a pointless waste of time that humanity should just move the hell along from).
It's pretty clear that Hawking realizes that what he's postulating can't be proven or disproven right now, but he's not putting it out there as an article of faith, either; he's saying that at some point in the future, between now and the heat death of the Universe, we'll probably be able to test it experimentally. That's a lot different than religion.
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No it doesn't. Reread his comment and try again. He says that we will "probably" be able to prove it. So it's not in the pile of things that definitely can't be proven, or in the pile that definitely can be proven. It's in the third pile - todo. The comparison was with religion which is squarely in the first pile.
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It's important to note that when a scientist says "This will be provable someday", what he means is, "It will be testable someday" which in turn means "It will be falsifiable someday." This means, in particular, that he is allowing for the distinct possibility that it will be disproved. Therein lies the difference.
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"). Scientists change their opinions. For example, before the wave-particle duality of light was understood, it was widely believed that light was a wave -- and because waves travel through a medium (like ripples in a pond, for example) it was widely believed that light also traveled through a medium -- a medium scientists called the "luminiferous aether". Its existance was widely believed in. And yet, experiments showed that this "aether" did not exist. What did scientists do? They changed their minds.
Religious people never change their minds. Or rather, those that do are called heretics, and up until recently were frequently burned at the stake.
As long as one recognizes that their religious beliefs are not supportable by empirical evidence (which is a no-brainer) and do not attempt to force those beliefs into their scientific work, there is no conflict.
You seem to think that the scientific process should consume those who use it. I couldn't disagree with you more. It is just a tool, not a religion in of itself. A tool, I might add, that was developed by the very "hypocrites" you decry.
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What you're referring to is known as Fundamentalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Chri
Religion and Science aren't opposites, and don't nullify each other.
Actually, it reads like TFSummary was much ado about something wrong. I went to a lot of trouble and such and RTFA'ed, but I don't see anything from the summary in the article.
I see a mention of "inflation," and a poke at the God Team, but I don't see any mention of "nothing." (If somebody has a transcript, I might be bothered to look for the promised proclamation, but I certainly couldn't find it in the article.) Mr. Hawking has apparently just pretended to have an understanding of the un-understandable problem that sits at the beginning of anyone's understanding of everything: something exists, where nothing used to.
Sure, the idea of an abrupt Creation, or "Design," of the universe lets us joke about what God was doing before he got around to Creation, but the metaphor of water (or, let's suppose, some kind of cosmic stew) boiling into steam/universes leaves us with the same problem that we had in the first place: where in the [space larger than a universe] did the water/stew come from?
As I read it, the exact same problem has been reached again - and Religion and Science both require a leap of perfect faith over the gap that is The Beginning of It All.
To quote Don Hirschberg, "Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
Then Asimov had some nice ideas:
* I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.
* If I am right, then (religious fundamentalists) will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If they are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.
* There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.
Why is it, I wonder, that people who believe in God, and particularly Christians, insist that anyone who does not is still religious? Are they so insecure in their beliefs that they must force some kind of belief system onto other people - even if only in their own minds? Why is it they insist that asking, "where is the proof?" formulates a religious belief?