The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, Bantam Books, New York; ISBN 978-0-553-80537-6, ©2010, $28.00, p. 181 plus glossary.
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — I attended a physics lecture in the late 1960s at which the visiting professor asserted that biology had morphed into chemistry, chemistry into physics, and physics into mathematics. It now appears that with the publication of Stephen Hawking’s newest book, The Grand Design, we can pronounce that physics has transformed into mathematics, philosophy, and even a little theology for good measure.
Hawking is the brilliant sixty-eight year old physicist/mathematician renowned for his contributions to cosmology and quantum gravity. He suffers from a motor-neuron disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and is wheel-chair bound. In addition, because of an emergency tracheotomy he lost his ability to speak and uses a voice-to-text speech synthesizer. Hawking is unique in that ALS patients rarely survive more than ten years after diagnosis. Doctors initially diagnosed him in 1985.
Darwin’s 1859 Origin of the Species proposed a model for the creation of life that does not mention God. Now, Hawking’s The Grand Design offers a model for the formation of the universe that does not require God to kick-start the Big Bang. Hawking starts out tackling three philosophical/theological questions. If the universe is governed by laws, then what is the origin of the laws? Do the laws have exceptions (are miracles real)? Are the laws of nature that we experience the only possible set of laws?
To answer his questions, Hawking takes the reader on a fast-paced twenty-five hundred year tour of scientific theories (the term theory is used differently by scientists than by lay people. For scientists a theory is a coherent set of propositions that explain a phenomenon. Lay people often use the word as a synonym for conjecture). His objective is to show how scientists are reducing the number of laws needed to represent the universe. Science-phobic readers may be unnerved by the details of the various theories; they are easily skipped without loss of the authors’ intention.
Hawking begins with the propositions of ancient Greek natural philosophers who dared to reject the pantheon of gods for a rational explanation of how the universe works, through the efforts of such notable scientists as Nicolas Copernicus who showed that the laws of astronomy could be explained and simplified from a geocentric frame of reference, and Isaac Newton, who conceived of the Theory of Gravity and demonstrated that terrestrial gravity and celestial gravity were identical. Hawking also describes the work of James Clerk Maxwell, who combined electricity and magnetism into a single unified theory called the Theory of Electromagnetism, and Albert Einstein, who told us of the malleability of time and space with his Theory of Relativity. He takes us through the theories that describe the subatomic world—quantum mechanics, concluding with the ground-breaking work of Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Phillips Feynman, called quantum chromodynamics, and the holy grail of physics, a theory of everything, called M-Theory (no one seems to know what the M stands for).
The Grand Design proposes additional philosophical/theological questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? Hawking answers that from Newton to the twentieth century many different deterministic physical laws existed that described bits and pieces of the universe. Some described the macroworld and others the microworld. Then, during the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics subsumed many of these laws, but at the cost of losing our intuition about the world around us and trading certainty for uncertainty. He draws the conclusion that M-Theory will embrace quantum mechanics and through just a few simple rules explain the start, operation, and end of our universe. M-Theory, in short, will show that the universe spontaneously created itself and established our unique set of natural laws that will carry us to the end of time. There is no need for a God hypothesis.
The Catholic Church has already responded. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, wrote , “Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse [meaning many universes] hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of ‘chance and necessity’ are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence.” With regard to biblical creation, the rabbinic sages in the Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud, Berachot 5:2) declared, “If there is no ‘discriminating intelligence’ how can there be separation?” Before you pooh-pooh Hawking’s declaration, remember that all the diversity in found living nature is built up on the combination of only four chemicals that make up DNA, thymine, cytosine, guanine and adenine. Complex systems can be built from just a few simple rules!
Science is a two-edged sword. With one edge it hacks through superstition and with the other it slashes away at our core beliefs. At one time people believed that the Earth stood in the center of the universe. Now we know that we are not only not at the center of the universe, we are not in the center of our own galaxy or even our own solar system. At one time people believed that the world was flat. Now we know it has the shape of an oblate sphere. At one time we rested assured that humans were created in the image of God. Nowadays we know that humans evolved from lower life forms. The Catholic Church dealt with Giordano Bruno by burning him at the stake for believing in an infinite universe and proposing that the stars in the night sky were suns similar to our own. The same church condemned Galileo to house arrest for teaching that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Christian fundamentalists, who reject the Theory of Evolution, insist on teaching Creationism and Intelligent Design, both of which are discredited speculations, on the same footing as Darwin.
Who knows if scientists will ever find their long-awaited treasure, the discovery of the Theory of Everything? If they do, we can be certain that a controversy encompassing that discovery will be at least as great as the controversy surrounding the Theory of Evolution. Yet, if human nature in the future is no different than in the past, then we can also predict that while science will win many minds, religion will capture many more hearts.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached through his website, www.fredreissbooks.com.