Hawking and the TOE DVD

Stephen Hawking is not a philosopher and he is as given to foolish remarks as any other physicist. He is not a philosopher of physics nor is he a philosopher of religion.

Those who make DVD's to popularize his views are often journalists - but not necessarily science journalists. Science journalism is demanding.

The first episode of the 2009 DVD Stephen Hawking and the Theory of Everything makes remarkable gaffes: the low-orbit space shuttle escapes earth's gravity (someone should tell the moon - and why haven't the earth and planets escaped the sun's gravity well? So we have not reached Kepler and Newton ... but we are shown a penny spiralling on a rubber sheet: the props are ready but the script is not.)

Next we are told that in the quantum foam of space, atoms go in and out of existence. Atoms. Well, that brings us almost to 1905.

Did they not think of having a high scholl physics teacher review their final cut?  Listen to it - not "watch it".

Of course the real problem is that even in 2009 we are portraying the "man" Hawking and not "the science". There is no one single authority on the current state theory of quantum gravity, dark matter and cosmology. But it is possible to get something of a balanced view by stepping back from the sycophants. Perhaps not as much a step back as Lee Smolin would suggest, but something more like an effort at objectivity.

Hawking likes to talk the God of Einstein, and while that may have been fine in 1950, the case against the God of the physicists is not much more conclusive than the case against larger stellar clusters at the hearts of spiral galaxies.

The case against an omniscient and omnipotent being who "decreed' the laws of this universe and then let it spin along has been made very well by philosopher Colin McGinn, to mention one.

If Hawking saw a resurgence of "constant state" cosmology based on the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" he would be right to be concerned. And we are right to be concerned about physics served as pablum. The universe is not porridge.

An interesting comparison might have been Hawking to Penrose - as seen by a mathematical physicist.  Or the popularization successes of Hawking and Greene - as seen by a critic.  Both Penrose and Green are somewhat troubling figures fro other reasons - interesting reasons.  But for that you would need BBC, PBS are a large grant.

Cp: Hubert Reeves or Davies or Gribbon