Stephen Hawking’s terrible disability combined with the phenomenal power of
his mind have made him a global brand as well as the single most
extraordinary guest star on both The Simpsons and Star Trek.
Hawking in a wheelchair talking through his computer has become the popular
embodiment of the word “genius”.
Furthermore, his heroic determination to keep on working at the highest level
through the appalling depredations of motor neurone disease is, in itself, a
potent symbol of the autonomy of the human imagination. Irrespective of what
final contribution he has made to cosmology — something we cannot yet know —
he perhaps deserved the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, Britain most important
scientific prize, simply for being our age’s emblem of big, adventurous and
exciting science.
And yet one very eminent scientist said to me: “He’s a great embarrassment to
us.” Many, probably most, scientists feel that these celebrity scientists
with their grand statements — Hawking promising a “theory of everything”,
Richard Dawkins disproving the existence of God — have become an unwelcome
burden for the institution of science.
Science is a humble and, in its way, a very narrow vocation. In spite of the
misleading headlines, it has almost nothing to say about human affairs and
it has enough problems without restarting a boring old fight with religion.
A theory of everything, meanwhile, would change almost nothing about the
practice of science and absolutely nothing in the human world. It certainly
won’t, as the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once absurdly suggested, stop
people reading their horoscopes.
“Science,” said Hawking last week, “after finding the ultimate theory, would
be like mountaineering after Everest.” Well, there’s still a lot of
mountaineering.
But it is the personality of Hawking that makes him such an intriguing and
frequently infuriating figure. I speak from experience: he changed my life.
I interviewed him just before A Brief History of Time made him a world star. I
was, at first, awestruck, a condition that subsided rapidly when he simply
refused to discuss what was an obvious inaccuracy through gross
over-simplification in his book and when, subsequently, his then wife, an
Anglican, told me, in a state of some distress, how arrogant and intolerant
he had become about religion.
My subsequent, Hawking-inspired sub-career of attempting to unpick the errors
and stupidities of all scientistic thinkers led to him calling me in print
“a failed intellectual”, a badge I still wear with some pride. After all,
what other kind is there?
His later book — The Universe in a Nutshell — was much better than A Brief
History, but it contained another egregious error. Hawking had taken the
title from some words spoken by Hamlet: “I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad
dreams.”
He says this means we are free to explore the universe despite our physical
limitations. In fact, Hamlet meant the opposite. The “infinite space” was an
illusion because it was just the inside of the nutshell. This is about
mental, not physical, limitation. Shakespeare, at least when writing Hamlet,
was incapable of banality.
Trivial, you may say, and it is true that a refusal or inability to read
carefully outside his subject is nothing against his physics. But, in fact,
I don’t think his science is quite what it seems either. Hawking does not
claim any of his theories are true. This is a perfectly respectable
scientific position, a form of positivism, in which theories are simply
useful tools. The question of whether the latest theory, called M-theory, of
the universe is true is meaningless. It is simply an idea that accords with
current observation and thought.
But I don’t understand — and nobody has yet succeeded in explaining to me —
how, in that case, we could ever claim to have a theory of everything that
was in any way final. Hawking gives a glimpse of the philosophical as well
as physical complexity of these matters in an answer he gave to The Sunday
Times last week.
“All the theories in the M-theory network can be regarded as approximations to
the same underlying theory, in different limits. None of the theories allow
calculations to arbitrary accuracy and reflections. Instead, they should be
regarded as effective theories, valid in different limits.”
At this level it becomes clear that science is very close to philosophy or
theology, too close for the comfort of those hard scientistic thinkers who
think that only they have the power to unlock the black box of reality. It
would take a Wittgenstein, not an Einstein, to decipher the correspondences
between such strange words and whatever residue of reality remains.
In fact, there is an important sense in which Hawking is the theologian of the
new scientism with Richard Dawkins as its philosopher. As a physicist,
Hawking is undoubtedly one of the small elite at the very top of the
subject. As a popular theologian, however, he is unique. A Brief History
famously ended with the words: “Then we shall know the mind of God.” This
was a metaphor. Hawking’s God would be, as he puts it, “an embodiment of the
laws of science”.
This may seem tame to anybody who wants a personal deity, but, in fact, it is
a very important and potent idea. Hawking may not actually believe the laws
of science are God, but, in his thinking, that is exactly the role they
play.
“The basic assumption of science is scientific determinism. The laws of
science determine the evolution of the universe, given its state at one
time. These laws may, or may not, have been decreed by God, but he cannot
intervene to break the laws, or they would not be laws. That leaves God with
the freedom to choose the initial state of the universe, but even here, it
seems, there may be laws. So God would have no freedom at all.”
But the basic assumption of science is not determinism, it is the efficacy of
the experimental method. This is not quite the same thing. After all, it is
perfectly possible that the experimental method could, one day, disprove
determinism without necessarily damaging science itself. But determinism is
Hawking’s basic assumption. And it is in this insistence on deterministic
finality — on some kind of god — that he is at his most theological.
The success of A Brief History of Time led directly to a wave of science books
full of triumphalist rhetoric about how everything had been or was about to
be explained. It was an astonishing phase, a rebirth of a scientistic faith
that I honestly thought had died in the 1930s.
As in that decade, it disseminated a myth and a theology. That myth was based
on the contemporary vanity that our age has unique access to the deep truths
of the universe and the theology was that we are no more than creatures of
known, deterministic laws. The first is self-evidently untrue and the second
cannot now or perhaps ever be known.
But Stephen Hawking deserves his medal and, from me, thanks for, perversely
perhaps, challenging me more than any other thinker alive.
www.bryanappleyard.com
