A Brief History of Time - Stephen W. Hawking

A Brief History of Time (Hawking, 1988)

"Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state..." Reading this book made me think of Sheldon Cooper from the sitcom The Big Bang Theory more than once. Hawking does an admirable job of transforming mathematical flights of theoretical physics into semi-palatable concepts for the average joe, occasionally adding some humor, and maybe doing a little too much academic name-dropping, but what can you do?  That's academia.

The first half of this book was great - I was reliving my astronomy class at KU. Einstein's theory of relativity, using the moons of Jupiter to calculate the finite speed of light, determining the chemical composition of stars through missing wavelengths of light in their spectrum, observing the expansion of the universe through Doppler-effect redshift, explaining gravity as the curvature of space-time created by matter - it was all coming back to me. Then we hit the quantum physics part, where a lot of that (well, really just the gravity) gets contradicted. At the end Hawking examines the efforts to bring general relativity and quantum physics together, but concrete and simple examples get harder and harder to find, as modern scientific models start to resemble angel-holding heads of pins.

I enjoyed seeing a lot of the assumptions behind the science.  While Hawking stresses that a scientific theory offers a framework under which observations could be made to disprove it, he takes several things for granted. First, he presents determinism and materialism as the basis of science: the idea that, if we knew the state of all energy and matter at one point in time in the universe, combined with a complete knowledge of the laws of physics, we could know everything that happened before or would happen after. Second, he presents the idea of God as patently unscientific, saying that even the Big Bang theory was unsettling to many scientists because it gave God room to create.  I guess these two assumptions go hand in hand, though he doesn't come across as anti-God, even saying that the purpose of science is to know the mind of God.

I did gain a greater respect for theoretical physics. Seeing the mathematically-based theories of various scientists born out by observation decades later is impressive, and it lends validity to extrapolating mathematically into unobservable territory, like black holes and dark matter. However, it also revealed several limitations, or perhaps prejudices of its theorists.  When we get theories about the universe being of finite space but with no edges or boundaries, and when this theory is more "scientifically acceptable" than the Big Bang theory (i.e., the universe didn't start, it just is), I have to wonder where the line is between physics and metaphysics.  I was also surprised by how often Hawking retreated to the weak anthropic principle, or, "the universe is the way it is because we are here, and if it went any other way, we would not have developed". I'm not sure what makes that scientific, but rules out "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". Neither can be disproved through observation.

This book was a good reminder that science can do an amazing job answering the small "why", but its attempts at the big "why" are a misappropriation of the mantle of science to advance a particular philosophy or worldview.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 weak anthropic principles