Stephen Hawking was a smart man, so much more so than myself that I don’t think you could begin to measure it. But something about this sounds… off somehow:
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.”
Thus one of the biggest-selling scientific books in publishing history, with worldwide sales credited at more than 10m, was consigned to the waste bin by its own author. Hawking and Hertog then began working on a new way to encapsulate their latest thinking about the universe.
Next month, five years after Hawking’s death, that book – On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s final theory – will be published in the UK. Hertog will outline its origins and themes at a Cambridge festival lecture on 31 March.
“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.
I think, though, it’s mostly creationists these days that use this argument as evidence for that God character; it goes back to at least Plato so it’s hardly a new idea, but it has been quite enthusiastically adopted by the intelligent design crowd. And seeing it attributed to Hawking like this just strikes me as a little weird. Because… let’s face it… the universe isn’t “perfectly” hospitable to life. Indeed, most of this planet alone isn’t hospitable to us (and most of the things that live in the seas that cover 71% of the planet similarly couldn’t survive in the other 29%), which should be enough to disqualify fine-tuning as a serious argument. To say nothing of the rest of the universe, most of which is, frankly, a vacuum…
The operative words, of course, are “as we know it”. Some 40 years ago, in an old edition of 2000 AD from 1983, there was a “Future Shock” strip, and after a LOT of searching I now know (thank you Elizabeth Sandifer) it was called “Eureka” and was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Mike White, and it’s about a human crew on a spaceship searching for alien life and not finding any. One of the crew theorises that an alien might just be a concept and not a physical thing at all, and this proves to in fact be the form of alien life they finally encounter, i.e. that the alien is literally an idea. “Eureka” (even if I have forgotten its name until now) has kind of haunted me for decades, and the idea that an alien entity might be of a form that we wouldn’t even recognise as life has lingered with me all that time.
And it’s kind of why the phrase “life as we know it” irritates me immensely. I mean, sure, we only have life as we know it here on Earth to go by, but I’ve always felt there’s a string of concomitant ideas springing therefrom… There seems to be the common assumption that if a given other planet couldn’t host “life as we know it” (by which we’re usually just referring to humans) then it couldn’t support any life, and similarly there’s the idea that if the universe had turned out an infinitesimal fraction different from how it did, then “life as we know it” wouldn’t have even happened. It’s like there’s some sort of weird lack of imagination in certain areas of scientific thinking, and I don’t understand it. So the universe might not have produced “life as we know it”… what about life as we DON’T know it? What about Moore’s idea, or Lovecraft’s “colour”? (Maybe even something that not only couldn’t conceive how other life might exist unrecognised by us but that it might do so?)
I mean, the question of how the universe did get to this point is an obviously vastly interesting one that we’re still figuring out, but I do feel like there’s a certain assumption that how the universe turned out was necessarily how it had to turn out for it to work… and I feel too that somewhere down that line of thinking is a point where you start to suspect fine-tuning of the universe. And somehow I’d be kind of surprised if Stephen Hawking did think that, as Tom Hertog seems to be implying about him…
