Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.