A Brief History of Time is ‘wrong’, Stephen Hawking told collaborator

A Brief History of Time is ‘wrong’, Stephen Hawking told collaborator

Robin McKie

Typing on the computer-controlled voice system that allowed the cosmologist to communicate, Hawking announced: “I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective.” ...

...“The problem for Hawking was his struggle to understand how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life,” says Hertog, a cosmologist currently based at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

Examples of these life-supporting conditions include the delicate balance that exists between particle forces that allow chemistry and complex molecules to exist. In addition, the fact there are only three dimensions of space permits stable solar systems to evolve and provide homes for living creatures. Without these properties, the universe would probably not have produced life as we know it, it is argued by some cosmologists.

According to Hertog, the new perspective that he has achieved with Hawking reverses the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics and is “profoundly Darwinian” in spirit. “It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organising entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics.”

A Brief History of Time is ‘wrong’, Stephen Hawking told collaborator
Robin McKie


It seems to me, Hawking just replaced one irrationality with another, and still makes the egregious error of sticking with just another version of reductionist materialism. 

Some perspectives on "evolutionary emergence" and "emergentism" from Wiki:

This family of hypotheses has been widely criticized for providing no mechanism to how entirely new properties emerge, and for its historical roots in teleology. Historically, emergent evolution has been described as an alternative to materialism and vitalism.

Emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism.

Some varieties of emergentism are not specifically concerned with the mind–body problem but constitute a theory of the nature of the universe comparable to pantheism. They suggest a hierarchical or layered view of the whole of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity with each requiring its own special science.

I think evolutionary emergentism amounts to proposing something (the existing huge amounts of functional complex specified information constituting the Universe's incredible degree of intelligent organization including life forms) coming from nothing in terms of intelligent organization. This is akin to proposing magic as being the creative power behind the Universe, and is basically irrational. It is just a seemingly more sophisticated way of denying any form of teleology and maintaining reductionist materialism, in the face of the facts of the Universe's existing very high and complex degree of organization, which in human experience is inherently and always the result of intelligence.

NB, you're all over it and its damn comical by its proponents.

The amount of mental, metaphysical gymnastics required to keep proposing these highly NON-intuitive, convoluted, complex, and non-evidential explanations staggers one's mind.  Its just ridiculous and the fact that this gets any airtime from people with no more authority to opine on the project than the proverbial every-man is a joke.  Stay in your lane bro.  That's my advice to physicists.

NB, you're all over it and its damn comical by its proponents.

The amount of mental, metaphysical gymnastics required to keep proposing these highly NON-intuitive, convoluted, complex, and non-evidential explanations staggers one's mind.  Its just ridiculous and the fact that this gets any airtime from people with no more authority to opine on the project than the proverbial every-man is a joke.  Stay in your lane bro.  That's my advice to physicists.

I do think this is just the necessary progression toward views that are more supportive of proponent [conceptions of reality].

I think Hawking shifting away from a machine interpretation dependent on physical laws is a pretty big deal, even if he didn't become a full proponent.

I do think this is just the necessary progression toward views that are more supportive of proponent [conceptions of reality].

I think Hawking shifting away from a machine interpretation dependent on physical laws is a pretty big deal, even if he didn't become a full proponent.

Agreed that its a material development (no pun intended  ).

Still, the whole thing is silly.  Hawking musing on these things is really no different from a babbling fool doing so in the town square.  Neither is more qualified nor more expert on the topic than the other.  So why so many have simply traded priests (theologians for physicists) on these topics just stupefies me.  Of course they don't see it this way.  I used to go 'round and 'round with some of our resident skeptics on the "faith" they placed in their priests (i.e., scientists).  They didn't see the promissory note of science's supposed ultimate ability to explain things as faith.  When, of course, it is.

[Ninshub]

This makes me think of Tim Freke moving towards emergentism in his own views. (Unfortunately, in my opinion.)

Agreed that its a material development (no pun intended  ).

Still, the whole thing is silly.  Hawking musing on these things is really no different from a babbling fool doing so in the town square.  Neither is more qualified nor more expert on the topic than the other.  So why so many have simply traded priests (theologians for physicists) on these topics just stupefies me.  Of course they don't see it this way.  I used to go 'round and 'round with some of our resident skeptics on the "faith" they placed in their priests (i.e., scientists).  They didn't see the promissory note of science's supposed ultimate ability to explain things as faith.  When, of course, it is.

I am of two minds on this. One the one hand I agree that someone being a physicist - or any other profession - doesn't mean they have a better grasp on the kinds of questions we often discuss here.

However, OTOH, in terms of giving some explanation that is satisfying having physics and the other sciences provides an anchor to what might otherwise be a plethora of views that are mere flights of fancy. For example it makes me feel better that Donald Hoffman is trying to reconcile his Idealist-esque views of Conscious Agents building reality with Quantum Physics, because it provides some path toward experimental verification or at least some grounding of what would otherwise be one more belief system among the incredible number we already have.

Unfortunately our human history has led to a deep antagonism between science [and] religion, at least in certain parts of the world. This has led to people's association of science with the materialist metaphysics even though the two should be separate.

This change in Hawking, before he passed away, is one step in moving beyond that antagonism. Especially given Hawking's stature as a scientific communicator to the public.

I am of two minds on this. One the one hand I agree that someone being a physicist - or any other profession - doesn't mean they have a better grasp on the kinds of questions we often discuss here.

However, OTOH, in terms of giving some explanation that is satisfying having physics and the other sciences provides an anchor to what might otherwise be a plethora of views that are mere flights of fancy. For example it makes me feel better that Donald Hoffman is trying to reconcile his Idealist-esque views of Conscious Agents building reality with Quantum Physics, because it provides some path toward experimental verification or at least some grounding of what would otherwise be one more belief system among the incredible number we already have.

Unfortunately our human history has led to a deep antagonism between science in religion, at least in certain parts of the world. This has led to people's association of science with the materialist metaphysics even though the two should be separate.

This change in Hawking, before he passed away, is one step in moving beyond that antagonism. Especially given Hawking's stature as a scientific communicator to the public.

My feeling is that by extrapolating equations far beyond their tested range, we aren't really doing science anymore. Nobody would use PV=RT at the pressures supposed to apply inside a neutron star, but that is because theorists think they know how PV=RT morphs into something quite different under such extreme conditions. However it is assumed that NG/GR is always true orders of magnitude outside the regions in which it has been tested. This means that alternative gravity equations aren't really considered and dark matter is supposed to fill 96% of the universe!

If we gave up this hubris, and only used equations in conditions where they were well tested - cautiously expanding those regions as extra evidence came along - science would move more slowly, but there would be much less sense that it might collapse like a house of cards. This approach would also stimulate a range of experiments that push measurements to increasingly challenging conditions.

David

If we gave up this hubris, and only used equations in conditions where they were well tested - cautiously expanding those regions as extra evidence came along - science would move more slowly, but there would be much less sense that it might collapse like a house of cards. This approach would also stimulate a range of experiments that push measurements to increasingly challenging conditions.

David

I don't know if all of science is in danger of collapsing like a house of cards?

I would somewhat agree that trying to go beyond applied science into speculative matters like whether time is a spatial dimension is overreach.

I don't know if all of science is in danger of collapsing like a house of cards?

Yes, I should have been a bit more specific.

For me, all talk of the Big Bang is really off-limits. If we don't really have a gravitational law at the galactic scale - because we have to fudge it up with 96% dark matter - then we can't make inferences on a still grander scale.

Maye the next step would be to launch a probe that could make gravity measurements (among many others) in interstellar space. We should only fudge gravitational calculations with dark matter if we find a plausible candidate for that elusive material.

In a completely different field, science should square up and own the problem that evolution by natural selection does not explain large scale evolution, nor does it explain the origin of life. As soon as genes were discovered to be encoded in DNA, and that mutations typically knocked out or replaced one codon at a time, science should have given up claiming to know the answer as to how we got here.

We also need a science that 'does something' with all the anomalous data - veridical NDE's etc.

The big problem as I see it, is that over time mistakes can expand exponentially. One erroneous result gets published, then maybe it gets incorporated into several other pieces of research .......

David