Hawking Contradiction

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Steven Hawking’s death continues to recede, but I am still processing it. Given his physical challenges it seemed a continuing miracle that he was alive. But strangely I kept thinking he would persist in defying the odds, and somehow always be there. You’d think our knowledge of his frailty would make his passing easier to accept. But it doesn’t.  

I often encourage my students to avoid being intimidated by the experts, the professionals, even the geniuses. If you want to write, write. If you want to sing, sing.  Driven to sculpt, start a business, become a philosopher or cosmologist, cardiologist, guitarist? Do it, do whatever you choose. Don’t worry about the myriad examples out there who seem to do it better than you. 

But once, maybe twice in a lifetime, you encounter an entity so exceptional that you realize that you could never reach the plateau from which they view the world. I saw Steven Hawking as one such person. But not merely as a physicist. Mathphobic from an early age, I never seriously contemplated playing in that sandbox, so have no real basis for evaluation. I am perfectly content to accept the shared notion that he was the best and brightest since Einstein. Yet there are others who would respond, “Yeah, but what about Feynman? Weinberg? Higgs? Greene? “ Not my sandbox. Not going there. And as I said Hawking staggers me not solely because of his accomplishments as a physicist, but more because he did it all inside his head. No blackboard, no scratchpad, no tablet computer. He was the captive of a body in full revolt, eventually able to only control a few facial muscles. But even so stricken, he was still able to think those amazing thoughts. So, confessing to that level of admiration, I feel less constrained in addressing what appears to be significant contradictions in some of his more broadly focused pronouncements.

  

The New York Times obituary reveals a few of them:

In “A Brief History of Time,” Dr. Hawking concluded that “if we do discover a complete theory” of the universe, “it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.” He added, “Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that,” he continued, “it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.” 

But then later, "Dr. Hawking felt that there was no need to appeal to anything outside the universe, like God, to explain how it began.“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper,” he wrote, referring to the British term for a firecracker fuse, “and set the universe going.”

He went further later that same year, telling the British newspaper The Guardian, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” 

But still again elsewhere, “God not only plays dice with the universe, but sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”

I find the certainty implied by these “Hawkingisms” interesting especially in light of his major finding “Hawking Radiation,” the formula for which he requested to have carved upon his tombstone. The intellectual pursuit that found its resolution in Hawking Radiation, began with other physicists challenging one of Hawking’s own earlier certainties - that nothing could escape the gravitational embrace of a black hole. Nothing, we now know, except Hawking Radiation, the electromagnetic energy that escapes when a black hole captures only half of a particle-antiparticle pair that can spontaneously form along the event horizon of a black hole.

So, I ask myself, is there not an inconsistency between an individual who has literally reshaped our perception of the universe purely through the manipulation of the electronic impulses in his brain, and the idea that “the brain is a computer that simply stops working when its components fail.” What happens to all the information - encoded in cascading mercurial electronic flashes, that resided in his living brain - information that, in my admittedly limited understanding of the reasoning underlying Hawking Radiation - cannot be lost? So where does that resident information go when the “components” fail? 

Perhaps Hawking’s earlier musing regarding the eventual potential to “know the mind of God” is informative. I have no intention of addressing what Hawking may have meant by God, or even more mysterious, “the mind of God.” But there is - in that phrase - an inescapable implication of a kind of universal sentience that still transcends even Hawking’s incredible intellectual scope. A sentience that may well find its clearest manifestation in a “sentient field” that - like the Higgs field imparting mass to all the particles in the universe - permeates the universe lending a shared sentience to existence. 

Again, it is good for us to remember that the awesome mental manipulations that led Hawking to the notion of Hawking Radiation were jump-started by the fact that his initial thoughts about black holes were wrong. They were “certainties” that had to be revised through deeper consideration. More energy, more information being ordered and reordered inside Hawking’s head.

I am reminded of Arthur C. Clark’s (author of among others, the Space Odyssey works) assertion that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It strikes me that there is a warning there. What appears to be magic will, given more time and additional reflection and research, reveal itself to be no more than the latest version of evolving technology. The same might be said of the transient certainties in Hawking’s seemingly conflicting observations. Is there “a mind of God” or do we need not “seek God to light the blue torch paper” of the universe? 

Surely, the most insidious intellectual trap for physicist and philosopher alike is certainty. In asserting the finality of death  - the final crash of the brain, the human computer - Hawking proves himself no more immune to hubris than the rest of us less gifted. The intricate patterns that danced across his stunning bundle of neurons were no random firings. They were intellectual symphonies of surpassing - and lasting - beauty.  And while they were certainly his creations, it is not for him to declare them extinguished with his passing.

I have no trouble imagining philosopher-physicists a thousand years hence explaining to their students, “Yes, they believed that the energy patterns of thoughts died when the individual brain in which they originated ceased its primary biological functions. Settle down now. I know, I know, it seems quite primitive. But remember we’re talking about the early 21st century. Things were quite primitive. It wouldn’t be until  2347 when Jannis et. al. discovered that .  .  .”  

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