(Unrevised and disjointed) Notes on Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" - Chapter 5

Chapter 5 - Elementary Particles and the Forces of Nature

Key concepts: gravity/levity, kinesis ("irregular, random" Brownian motion), quarks(/antiquarks), discourse**, (in)divisibility/elementariness, Pauli exclusion principle, relativity + quantum, anti-electron/positron, particle/antiparticle**, annihilation, the four forces, confinement, meson, decay, arrival.

"...Einstein pointed out that what was called Brownian motion--the irregular, random motion of small particles of dust suspended in liquid--could be explained as the effect of atoms of the liquid colliding with the dust particles" (66). This is not only kinesis, but "irregular, random" kinesis--a motion that, as motion, not only disrupts stasis, and therefore prevents or undoes fixity, but also lends a further element of disruption through its irregularity and randomness. This is perfectly in tune, it seems to me, with the rest of quantum physics, which serves to deconstruct notions of knowability, nameability, understanding, and fixity by way of its inherent, fundamental "uncertainty."

The alleged "indivisibility" of the atom (Democritus first invoked the notion of the atom, which in Greek means "indivisible") was first undermined by Rutherford's discovery of the atom's internal structure, namely, the protons and neutrons at its center, and the electrons orbiting its nucleus. Hawking notes that "[u]p to about thirty years ago, it was thought that protons and neutrons were 'elementary' particles, but experiments in which protons were collided with other protons or electrons at high speeds indicated that they were in fact made up of smaller particles" (named "quarks" by Murray Gell-Mann) (67). (Interestingly, he took their name from James Joyce ("Three quarks for Muster Mark!")). Hence, "neither the atoms nor the protons and neutrons within them are indivisible. So the question is: what are the truly elementary particles, the basic building blocks from which everything is made?" (68). The notion invokes yet another intellectual wall inherent in physics, which is this notion of indivisibility. Though the indivisibility of the atom has been disproved, and, further, the indivisibility of the atom's constituent parts has also been disproved, Hawking still holds onto this notion of indivisibility, proposed by Democritus over two millenia ago. How long can we hold onto this notion? It seems pretty clear that what we declare "elementary" is merely the smallest thing we can find at the moment with the means at hand, and could therefore be declared indefinitely, without any definitive arrival whatsoever at anything that might be called purely or "truly" elementary.

We have no doubt all heard the somewhat trippy notion of the entire known universe (known to us, that is) being merely a single atom or molecule in the fingernail of some other being. The seemingly endless discovery of smaller and smaller bits of being suggests that this may not be as absurd as it seems on its face. The sheer smallness of the atom itself (Chown notes that "it would take 10 million, laid end to end, to span the width of a period," p. 6) and the overwhelming and nearly incomprehensible (at best) vastness of the known universe, along with the radical and fundamental uncertainty, unpredictability, and randomness revealed by quantum physics, indeed suggest that what we "know" cosmologically and atomically may very well only be shadows of a reality we cannot even begin to comprehend, much less observe and measure. This, I think, is where Hawking's scientific optimism becomes most questionable, for there seems no conceivable way for us primates--on this insignificant speck of rock, circling an insignificant star in an insignificant galaxy in an insignificant neighborhood of the known (insignificant?) universe--could even begin to theorize, much less determine, the possibility of our universe being some "quark" (or subquark) in the "proton" of an "atom" of a "molecule" in something much more vast. We are, after all, so incredibly much larger than an atom that if we imagine it, for example, as a small solar system, with a species of beings living on the surface of its orbiting electron, it is almost certain that such beings would never ascertain our existence. If things can be so disparately great and small, as the cosmological and quantum worlds evidently are, there seems very little we can hope to know by way of "indivisibility" or elementariness. We are quite laughably insignificant in size in comparison to what we perceive to be the size of the universe, and quarks are absurdly small in comparison to us. Since we cannot (as Hawking admits) incorporate any notion of infinity in any practical way, we can hardly conceive of an order of magnitude that would increase with infinite bigness (beyond the cosmological) in one direction, and with infinite smallness in the other (beyond the quark). If such a scale existed, even if it were finite, we primates could exist at any point on that scale without having the slightest clue about it. The universe, for example, may be quite low on the scale, and its relative enormity to us therefore quite small, or it may be near the maximum, making even us primates quite comparatively large. Whether such a scale exists, or is finite or infinite, the concept of (in)divisibility becomes rather moot, most obviously on the infinite continuum, but on the finite one as well, because the smallest thing we can ascertain (as far as I know, the quark) may in fact be nowhere near the low end of this scale of magnitude. We may be, even in our most grand and far-reaching theories, doomed to a hopelessly inescapable myopia. And we would never know it.

Things get rather interesting when Hawking begins to describe the different varieties (or "flavors") of quarks, which take the form of euphemistic misnomers like "up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top" (67). He further notes that each flavor "comes in three 'colors,'" another specious metaphor used for the sake of clarity. It is interesting how the discourse of science becomes more flimsy the more colloquial it becomes, in the sense that it becomes so metaphorical (like "spin") as to be blatantly inaccurate in any understood linguistic sense. At such a point, it seems to me, scientific discourse becomes undeniably postmodern, and flagrantly admits all of the resultant aspects thereof, including Foucauldian notions of discourse and Derridean deconstruction. Indeed, the invocation of colors and flavors compels Hawking to include the following digression: "It should be emphasized that these terms are just labels: quarks are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light and so do not have any color in the normal sense. It is just that modern physicists seem to have more imaginative ways of naming new particles and phenomena--they no longer have to restrict themselves to Greek!" (67). The result, of course, is a new discourse that readily admits, as Hawking's digression attests, to the existence of itself as discourse. Such descriptions are therefore indicative of a (perhaps only tacit, or unconscious) readiness to embrace the poststructuralist notion of a decentered universe, a deconstructive self-reflexivity that incorporates, reflects, and employs the ideational proposals of late twentieth-century "literary theory." The instant at which scientific discourse acknowledges its figurality is the precise moment in which it becomes literary criticism. Combine this with Hawking's definition of "theory" and you have a discourse that can only claim to "read" humanity, the world, the cosmos, and being to the same extent which literature and literary critics (and other constituents of the "humanities") claim to do so. Indeed, perhaps the American insistence on using the term "humanities" instead of "human sciences" is reflective of our reticence to acknowledge what "continental" thinkers seem less anxious about--the fundamentally "human" aspect of science, its figurality, tenuousness, and anthropocentric constructedness.

Hawking makes a similar qualification later in the chapter when he discusses four types of forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear): "It should be emphasized that this division into four classes is man-made [as if it could be anything else]; it is convenient for the construction of partial theories, but it may not correspond to anything deeper. Ultimately, most physicists hope to find a unified theory that will explain all four forces as different aspects of a single force. Indeed, many would say this is the prime goal of physics today" (72). Here again, while being very candid about the constructedness of his discourse, Hawking is still insistent on arrival, on getting to the bottom of things, on discovering the "truth." This of course consists of, as in every other truth discourse, the reduction of multiplicity to a singular, coherent, and unified oneness. Why should this be goal? Wasn't this always the goal, before the advent of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle? Do these revelations really not modify the "prime goal of physics today" any more than Hawking suggests here? If not, how fucking boring is that?

"Pauli's exclusion principle says that two similar particles cannot exist in the same state; that is, they cannot have both the same position and the same velocity, within the limits given by the uncertainty principle" (70). Still not entirely clear on this one.

positrons = anti-electrons. "We now know that every particle has an antiparticle, with which it can annihilate" (70-1). I must admit I LOVE this idea. There is a symmetry to it, agreed, but anything "anti" and/or annihilative turns me on. Furthermore: "There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles" (71). Bizarro?

(Unrevised and disjointed) Notes on Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" - Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - The Uncertainty Principle

Key concepts: scientific determinism (Marquis de Laplace), uncertainty principle (Heisenberg), quanta (Planck), Occam's razor, probability, randomness, duality/interference, "sum over histories" (Feynman)??

"The success of scientific theories, particularly Newton's theory of gravity, led the French scientist Marquis de Laplace at the beginning of the nineteenth century to argue that the universe was completely deterministic...that there should be a set of scientific laws that would allow us to predict everything that would happen in the universe, if only we knew the complete state of the universe at one time. For example, if we knew the positions and speeds of the sun and the planets at one time, then we could use Newton's laws to calculate the state of the Solar System at any other time" (55). This is all well and good, Hawking suggests, when the solar system is the object of study. However, when the object of study is human behavior, for example, or even takes place on anything other than a macro, Newtonian level, determinism becomes completely untenable.

In 1900, Planck put forth the idea of what he called quanta: the constituent "packets" in which waves must be emitted (56). In 1926, Heisenberg noticed (as I discussed vis-a-vis Chown) that we could only know the position or velocity of any particle with any degree of certainty. The more certainly we could ascertain the position of a particle, the less we would know about its velocity, and vice versa. This discovery essentially shoots scientific determinism to shit, because we can never "know" the position and motion of any one particle at any given time: "The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!" (57). Hawking further notes that "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world" (57). So how does this affect Hawking's search for a "complete unified theory"? Is there no element of scientific determinism inherent in such a quest? None at all?

A fundamental result of uncertainty is that "quantum mechanics does not predict a single definite result for an observation. Instead, it predicts a number of different possible outcomes and tells us how likely each of these is" (58). The discourse of physics, then, becomes one not of certainty, but of probability--not of "complete," unified descriptions, but partial ones. "Quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science" (58). Again, how does this jive with Hawking's goal? Is it merely to say that, in theory, a theory which describes the incompleteness of itself can, in this sense, be considered "complete"? If we can predict the level of unpredictability with fairly acute accuracy, have we satisfied our litmus test of predictability?

"Einstein's general theory of relativity seems to govern the large-scale structure of the universe. It is what is called a classical theory; that is, it does not take account of the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics" (63). Is relativity then more akin to Newtonian physics, which it completely undermined, than it is to quantum mechanics ("...classical general relativity, by predicting points of infinite density, predicts its own downfall, just as classical...mechanics predicted its downfall by suggesting that atoms should collapse to infinite density," p. 63)? If so, how does one justify the switch from Einstein to Heisenberg at that moment when the backward tape of the universe's expansion crosses the apparently arbitrary boundary between macro and micro, classical and quantum?

(Unrevised and disjointed) Notes on Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" - Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - The Expanding Universe

Key concepts: fixity/static, expansion, "finite without any edges or boundaries," general relativity + quantum physics, singularity [e.g. big bang], time/beginning, collapse, Marxism and scientific determinism**, general relativity as self-destructive.

"...our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars" (38). Hubble's observation of these galaxies moving away from us at rapid speeds "meant that the universe could not be static, as everyone previously thought, but is in fact expanding; the distance between the different galaxies is growing all the time" (41). Every galaxy is in perpetual motion (relative, of course, to other galaxies. To suggest "motion" without this relativity is pointless), and every star within that galaxy is in perpetual motion relative to that galaxy's "center," and every conceivable planet in every star's hypothetical "solar system" is in motion relative to that star, and every one of those planets is in motion relative to its own axis, and every atom in existence on, in, and of that planet is itself in motion relative to others, as are its constituent parts relative to its center. Now that's what I call kinetic.

Hawking begins to more thoroughly flesh out his dream of a unified theory in this chapter, suggesting that "when one combines general relativity with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, it is possible for both space and time to be finite without any edges or boundaries" (47). Here we are implicitly encouraged, of course, to imagine the universe as a sphere not unlike Earth (except, of course, for the somewhat significant addition of a fourth dimension). The surface of a sphere has no edges or boundaries, and can thus be traversed infinitely in any given direction without "falling off" an edge or running into a wall; yet it is finite in extent. Think, then, of the universe's expansion as a swelling, much like a balloon (or the Earth) being inflated; wherever we are on the surface of a hypothetical expanding Earth, any markers we might see--another standing person, for example--would be moving away from us as the Earth was "inflated." This would be true at all points on the surface. Additionally, the greater the distance between any two markers (people in this case), the greater the rate of retreat between them. Imagine, now, that you play this expansion in reverse, and watch it unfold backwards. Such a conception suggests that there must be some "beginning"--the big bang, in the case of the universe--in which time "began." Hawking notes that this can only be described, and has been described for some time, as a "singularity," i.e., an "event" in which every scientific theory or law completely breaks down, even relativity: "...all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite" (49). In other words, "any body undergoing gravitational collapse must eventually form a singularity" (52).

***Here again we see the universe's (and thus being's) radical unknowability consistently revealed by contemporary physics. As primates in a three-dimensional world, we constantly rely on metaphors and analogies in order to describe and understand what appears to be the four-dimensional being of the cosmos, groping sprawlingly at the concepts of infinity, eternity, duality, relativity, and other such counterintuitive and mostly unimaginable esoterica.

"There was a lot of opposition to our work, partly from the Russians because of their Marxist belief in scientific determinism, and partly from people who felt that the whole idea of singularities was repugnant and spoiled the beauty of Einstein's theory. [...] I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe--as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account" (53). In other words, "there must have been a time in the very early universe when the universe was so small that one could no longer ignore the small-scale effects of the other great partial theory of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics" (54). Quantum mechanics prevents singularities? But isn't the point at which we have to switch from relativity to quantum mechanics a kind of methodological singularity? Some kind of fudge?

*** "...general relativity is an incomplete theory: it cannot tell us how the universe started off, because it predicts that all physical theories, including itself, break down at the beginning of the universe" (53-4). This is an astounding notion: first, that general relativity necessitates its own deconstruction; it is, in other words, built in. This, I think, is an intriguing and potentially strong contact point between physics and lit crit. Second, Hawking's statement is intriguing because he cannot bring himself to believe that this can be the case--that such a self-reflexively deconstructive proposition could itself reflect a deconstructive ontology inhering (so far as we may admit such a word) in the cosmos. In other words, perhaps self-destruction is, as the poststructuralists seem to suggest, and for lack of a better description, the fundamental aspect of cosmological being.***

(Unrevised and disjointed) Notes on Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - Space and Time

Key concepts: stasis/kinesis, (non)absolute position, event, speed of light, mass-energy, space/time relativity, space-time as object (thingness), 4-D, elsewhere**, pastness (of the observable universe), curvature/warp.

Aristotle believed that stasis was the fundamental condition of being: "the natural state of a body was to be at rest and...it moved only if driven by a force or impulse" (15). On this point, it turns out, Aristotle could not have been more wrong. All the evidence, both atomic and cosmological, suggests that the opposite is true; everything is in a constant state of motion. On the atomic level, of course, electrons are in orbit about their respective nuclei, but even in addition to that, the atoms themselves are in a perpetually kinetic state: "The big difference between the ideas of Aristotle and those of Galileo and Newton is that Aristotle believed in a preferred state of rest, which any body would take up if it were not driven by some force or impulse. In particular, he thought that the earth was at rest. But it follows from Newton's laws that there is no unique standard of rest" (17, emphasis added). That atomic motion becomes more frenzied at increased temperatures is well-known; less well-known is the fact that even at so-called "absolute zero," at which point atomic motion is said to halt, there is still a residual Brownian motion--the "jitter" of atoms perpetually in motion.

Kinesis, furthermore, is also the fundamental state of being on the cosmological level. It has become apparent that what is typically thought of as the "force" of gravity is not really a force at all (see Chown, "The Quantum Zoo," Part II). Rather, mass-ive cosmological objects--the Earth, for example--are in a constant state of free-fall (no doubt a difficult concept to process, as "falling" implies movement from "up" to "down," and something that takes place finitely, i.e., with some-thing at the "bottom" on which a falling object eventually "lands"). What keeps the Earth in orbit around our sun is not a "force" of gravity at all; instead, the Earth is merely falling in a "straight line," as objects tend to do--the "straight line" is merely a four-dimensional one, so we end up seeing it as a curve. (Think of a plane flying from New York to London. It takes not a straight but a curved path, because this is the shortest distance in three dimensions, despite the fact that the surface of the Earth is two-dimensional, and therefore subject to the "shortest-distance-between-two-points-is-a-straight-line" characteristic.) This is because the sun, as a large, massive object, literally "warps," or "curves," the space-time around it: "...gravity is not a force like other forces, but is a consequence of the fact that space-time is not flat, as had been previously assumed: it is curved, or 'warped,' by the distribution of mass and energy in it" (30). Therefore, free-falling in a straight line, the Earth orbits the much more massive sun: "In general relativity, bodies always follow straight lines in four-dimensional space-time, but they nevertheless appear to us to move along curved paths in our three-dimensional space" (31). Mindfuck, right? Makes no sense?

"...suppose [a] Ping-Pong ball on [a] train bounces straight up and down, hitting the table twice on the same spot one second apart. To someone on the track, the two bounces would seem to take place about forty meters apart, because the train would have traveled that far down the track between the bounces. The nonexistence of absolute rest therefore meant that one could not give an event an absolute position in space, as Aristotle had believed" (18). To the rigorously practically minded realist, this may seem a nitpicky point. A more serious consideration of this "event," however, reveals a fundamental disjuncture in what we consider to be reality. Both the person on the train, who says the ball hit in the exact same spot, and the person on the bank, who says it hit forty meters apart, have a legitimate, verifiable explanation of this event. The ball did hit the table twice in exactly the same physical spot; it also did hit the table the second time some forty meters from where it had hit the first time. The two accounts are both wholly verifiable and--here's the kicker--wholly incompatible. Does this say something merely about perspective, i.e., Einstein's persistent infatuation with "the observer" or "any observer"? Or is there a useful (at least intellectually) way of removing observers from the situation? Imagine the ball drops from the ceiling of the train and hits the table in the "same spot" (assume, for the sake of useful discussion, that this event can be said to "happen" without a primate in proximity to witness it). If we take this to be as "actual" as anything else we consider to be actual, the ball, in relation to the Earth, has hit the table the second time quite a physical distance from where it hit the first time. That is, relative to the train and to the Earth, the event has two wholly accurate and wholly incompatible dimensions, a "duality" that will later be reflected by the wave-particle nature of light, the basis for Hugh Everett's "many-worlds" interpretation of being. When such multiplicity--in the present case, duality--is clearly so fundamental to being, and all things are in perpetual motion, how is it that Hawking can hope for "a complete unified theory" that describes every-thing in the uni-verse?

Well, as a partial answer to this, there is the speed of light. "The fundamental postulate of the theory of relativity," Hawking writes, "was that the laws of science should be the same for all freely moving observers, no matter what their speed" (20). Ironically, it is this very constancy of "laws" that allows for the radical inconstancy implied by the term "relativity"; it is the relentlessly and unfailingly constant speed of light which allows for the perpetually dual nature of all of being's events in time and space.

An event itself is a crippling mystery. Hawking defines it later as "something that takes place at a single point in space, at a specified point in time," or "something that happens at a particular point in space and at a particular time" (22, 24). However, we now know there is no such thing as an event that "takes place at a single point in space" or "at a specified point in time." Hawking points out that "the choice of coordinates is arbitrary"--the spatial "position" is determined by three figures from an arbitrarily constructed structure, and the temporal "position" is similarly marked by something we made up called a "clock." The fallibility of this system is shown by the later proposition that we should think of events, if we think of them at all, as taking place "in a four-dimensional space called space-time," in which the fourth dimension, which behaves not altogether unlike the other three, is time: "We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time" (23). Hawking's language here is very revealing; he refers to space-time as "an object," providing it with a thingness we wouldn't normally attribute to empty space, and certainly not to time.

As I noted with Chown, mass and energy can be put into equivalence (as in E=mc^2), meaning that mass and energy are not mutually exclusive things. Rather, we might consider the amalgam mass-energy, somewhat like we consider not space and time, but rather space-time. Resultantly, "the energy which an object has due to its motion will add to its mass" (21). This is the reason why the speed of light (300,000 km/s) is often referred to as the "cosmic speed limit" (or some comparably cutesy euphemism): nothing with mass could ever (theoretically--this is obviously not testable) travel as fast or faster than light, for the increasing energy required to get matter moving that quickly would consistently add to its mass, meaning it would require more energy to continue its acceleration, which would add more mass, and so on. Ultimately, there is not enough energy in the entire universe to support the kind of mass-ive acceleration this would require. It is also interesting to note the breakdown of the dividing line between mass and energy, which gives energy a thingness we had originally reserved for the more "material" nature of mass.

"...the future light cone of the event" (26). What the FUCK is this? "Only events in the future of P can be affected by what happens at P because nothing can travel faster than light. [...] Similarly, the past of P can be defined as the set of all events from which it is possible to reach the event P traveling at or below the speed of light" (27). Again, as in discussing space-time as "an object," is this description of time as "actual" as, say, a description of my hand, or of a tree, or even of a discourse? Or is all of this shit purely made up out of whole cloth? The discussions of physics lead me to believe that the humanities' quaint dismissal of anything that might be called real "time" as a complete fiction of the collective mind is severely challenged by people like Hawking and Einstein. But is the character they assign to time, its thingness, "actual"? How the fuck can we get around this?

What I like about the "future light cone," even though I don't entirely understand it, is the following: "The events that do not lie in the future or past of P are said to lie in the elsewhere of P" (27). "Lying in the elsewhere" is definitely something I will have to think very thoroughly and very seriously for this thesis. For example, this is saying that some-thing in the "elsewhere" is (a) not a possible precursor to the event, and (b) not a possible outcome or antecedent to the event. "What happens at such events can neither affect nor be affected by what happens at P" (27). How does this relate to the profound interconnectedness provided by our atomic makeup? Can such events really be said to be wholly unrelated when even Hawking, later in the book, discusses the ever-increasing nature of entropy in the universe, which is always consistently contributed to by all things in all places at all times?

"...when we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past" (28). The fact that light from distant galaxies has not yet made it to us makes, I think, a strong case for time being something we have to consider "real" or at least "actual."

*** "Newton's laws of motion put an end to the idea of absolute position in space. The theory of relativity gets rid of absolute time" (34). What have we, then? Space-time? Or nothing? It might be said that this is indeed a reflection of what I said (in discussing Chown) about the atom itself being a sort of undermining or obliteration (or at least an aberration from) what we consider to be "space" and "time." Neither is constant. The only thing that is constant--perhaps, the only thing that is actual--is the speed of light. Everything else is tenuous and subject to interpretation, argumentation, conflicting accounts, etc. "Space and time are now dynamic qualities: when a body moves, or a force acts," writes Hawking, "it affects the curvature of space and time--and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act" (34). The fixity of positions in space or moments in time is a fiction. But does space-time "really" curve, or does our conception of space-time (or space_and_time, for that matter) merely need to be adjusted? Is the curving taking place "out there" in space, or in the minds of physicists? Is this an answerable question?

(Unrevised and disjointed) Notes on Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" - Chapter 1

In the foreword, and repeatedly afterward, Hawking makes no bones about his conception of scientific inquiry. His goal, similar to Einstein's, is nothing short of "a complete unified theory of physics," based on the bold, age-old assumption that "the universe is governed by a set of rational laws that we can discover and understand" (viii). These crucial words--complete, unified, unification, rational, understand--are ubiquitous in his writing. I have no choice but to wonder whether this makes him a kind of "classical" scientist--in the sense that he must somehow find his way around relativity and quantum theory so he can somehow recenter his conception of a radically decentered universe--or if instead relativity and quantum physics are so abstruse for one such as me, and his understanding of it so thoroughly sophisticated, that I simply cannot find a way aboard the unification train, no matter how baldly the evidence beckons me there (which is more likely the case, since, after all, he is Stephen Hawking, for fuck's sake). He later clarifies his conception of a unified theory, however, suggesting that it must necessarily consist of a multiplicity of theories that are unified only in the sense that they overlap when circumstances allow them to, which may or may not be a way of saying that a "complete unified theory" is really a kind of patchwork bricolage of occasionally varied conclusions about the nature of the universe. (I will discuss this in my reviews of later chapters.)

Chapter 1 - Our Picture of the Universe

Key concepts: (de)center(ed), spheres, comfort, eternal/infinite v. temporal/finite, "First Cause"/beginning, antinomies, TIME, event, stasis/kinesis, theory, general relativity, quantum physics, arbitrary/lawful, observer imbrication (Derrida: "caught in the game"), dream of presence.

Supplementary works: Aristotle, On the Heavens; Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica; St. Augustine, The City of God; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Aristotle believed, "for mystical reasons, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that circular motion was the most perfect" (2). [referencing On the Heavens]. Newton puzzled over why gravity did not cause the stars to collapse into one another, but "reasoned that if...there were an infinite number of stars, distributed more or less uniformly over infinite space, this would not happen, because there would not be any central point for them to fall to" (5). Hawking elaborates, saying that in "an infinite universe, every point can be regarded as the center" (5). Is it safe to say, then, that every point can be equally regarded as not-center, i.e., that the universe is without center? And if so, is it too much to extend this lack of "physical" center to the conceptual understanding of the cosmos, i.e., that it, too, is without a central unifying principle? Obviously, Hawking's writing would suggest that such an extrapolation is wholly without merit.

Hawking notes that before the twentieth century, "[i]t was generally accepted that either the universe had existed forever in an unchanging state, or that it had been created at a finite time in the past more or less as we observe it today," suggesting that these two frameworks may have been attributable to "people's tendency to believe in eternal truths, as well as the comfort they found in the thought that even though they may grow old and die, the universe is eternal and unchanging" (6). Is there a difference between seeking the eventual arrival at a complete unified theory, and the belief in "eternal truths"? Would not a full, complete, thorough description of the universe as it really is constitute an "eternal truth"? That is, insofar as we consider the age of the universe to be, at least in lay terms, "eternal." As Hawking later points out, time begins at the big bang (this is an incredibly difficult concept to contemplate, as we shall later see), and so the universe itself is, to the best of our knowledge, not literally eternal. But, for the average, earthbound, mortal primate, whose life expectancy hovers around 70 or 80 years, 14 billion years may as well be eternity for all practical intents and purposes. We are told repeatedly that even the existence of the human race (perhaps roughly 200,000 years in duration) is a virtually imperceptible flash in terms of biological time, to say nothing of geological or cosmological time, both of which can be measured in billions of years. Is Hawking's quest for a complete unified theory also a quest for "comfort," a substitution of center for center? (Derrida: "...the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation or the transformation of elements...is forbidden. [...] Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality" (279).)

The issue becomes further complicated by the well-known Newtonian question of why, if the universe is more or less infinite, and there is a more or less infinite amount of stars, does the night sky not shine bright white with their light? The only tenable explanation seems to be that "the stars had not been shining forever but had turned on at some finite time in the past" (7). This means that light from the most distant stars and galaxies has not yet reached us, which explains the black space between dots of light in the night sky. Hawking points out that this brings up another touchy philosophical issue, that of the "First Cause." Since "[w]ithin the universe, you always explained one event as being caused by some earlier event," it became clear that "the existence of the universe itself could be explained in this way only if it had some beginning" (7). Interestingly, Hawking writes that "Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers...did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world around it had existed, and would exist, forever" (8). This is of course demonstrably wrong, but is useful in thinking about contemporary issues in cosmology, particularly in the "popular" realm, and the kind of religious backwardness concerning a "young" earth and/or universe, which, when laid next to the Greeks, appears a regression of the highest order. [How might this be related to Spanos' Heideggerian reading of the Greeks and Romans? How does Lucretius fit into all this?]

Time: "...the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe" (8). Hawking notes that when the generally accepted description of the universe was that it was "essentially static and unchanging, the question of whether or not it had a beginning was really one of metaphysics or theology" (8-9). This question was "finally brought...into the realm of science" as a result of Hubble's observation of the red shift, which demonstrated that galaxies, including our own, were flying apart from one another--that the universe was expanding (9). This of course suggested that, were we able to rewind the video of the universe unfolding and watch time go backward, all the matter in the universe would fly together into one mass (this will be discussed at length later). Such a shrinking, as we watch the tape backwards, could not possibly go on forever; there must have been one point at which the universe as we know it was, for lack of a better term, "born" (Hawking seems to love the term "created," though it of course smacks of theological preoccupations, which come out quite frequently in his book with his frequent references to God setting this all in motion. The figurality of such descriptions is often tacitly (apparently) denied by the author.) So there was, in fact, a "beginning" of time: "If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences" (9) [land before time, dawn of history, etc]. "In an unchanging universe," Hawking continues, "a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necessity for a beginning" (9). We know, though, that the universe never stops changing--kinesis, for example, is the fundamental state of every-thing, from the smallest subatomic particle (even at so-called "absolute zero") to galaxies comprised of millions of stars. These things are all in motion (relative to each other, of course. Einstein!)

Perhaps the most interesting passage in this chapter is Hawking's discussion of the nature of science and, in particular, theory (**there could obviously be parallels drawn here between scientific "theory" and the sort privileged by literary criticism): "In order to talk about the nature of the universe and to discuss questions such as whether it has a beginning or an end, you have to be clear about what a scientific theory is. I shall take the simpleminded view that a theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean)" (10). He goes on to say that "a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation" (10). I find it fascinating that Hawking is so deliberately forthright about highlighting the constructedness and fictiveness of scientific theories in contradistinction to the universe "out there." If he is willing to concede this much structurality, it is perhaps not so great a step to deconstructing his own discourse. Fittingly, he adds that "[a]ny physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it" (10). Candid and humble as this is, he is more than willing as the book continues to cite examples where he "proved" this or that hypothesis in his own work. This becomes particularly problematic in Chapter 11, when he notes the three possible states of his cosmological inquiry:

1. There really is a complete unified theory (or a collection of overlapping formulations), which we will someday discover if we are smart enough.
2. There is no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe more and more accurately.
3. There is no theory of the universe: events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner. (183)

It should come as no surprise, given what Hawking writes in his foreword (and at the close of nearly every chapter), that he believes the first possibility to be the most promising. However, isn't such a position radically undermined by what he says of theory in Chapter 1? Is a unified theory really "complete" if it "exists only in our minds"? What manner of completeness is this, and of what use could it possibly be if it has no existence outside the crania of a few physics professors?

"The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe" (11). Again, Hawking admits that such a beast must necessarily take the form of "a collection of overlapping formulations" (even though he stresses "single theory"): "...we break the problem up into bits and invent a number of partial theories. Each of these partial theories describes and predicts a certain limited class of observations, neglecting the effects of other quantities, or representing them by simple sets of numbers" (11). Oddly, and perhaps most interestingly, Hawking adds that "[i]t may be that this approach is completely wrong." Despite this, contemporary physics relies on two theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics, which, according to Hawking, "are known to be inconsistent with each other--they cannot both be correct" (12). Mmm...k? Soooooo...?

"...if you believe that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine the partial theories into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. But there is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. [...] [I]f there really is a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions. And so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it!" (13). Pretty Po-Mo, no? In other words, we are inextricably enmeshed in that which we observe, and can therefore never be able to observe the universe from the outside (in fact, there is only quite a small portion of it we can even observe from the inside). He goes on to say that even though "the search for the ultimate theory of the universe seems difficult to justify on practical grounds," most of us higher order primates "have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world." Thus, "our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in" (14). Is this realistic, tenable, believable? Does the desire for order--for central organizing principles, the dream of presence--constitute a justification for the continued search for it? Does our desire to find order and connectedness wherever we look have any bearing whatsoever on whether such order is "really" at work? Surely, this is where the sciences and the humanities (or at least those of a poststructuralist or postpoststructuralist leaning) part ways.