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.
