The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Joseph27 · Post by **Joseph27** » 3rd Sep, '10, 09:11

THE Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going”.

This is moving away from Hawking's earlier work in which he still allowed for the presence of a deity; he has put another nail in the coffin of a personal god.

Burbage · Post by **Burbage** » 3rd Sep, '10, 09:20

Well, considering gods didn't exist until humans evolved about 200,000 years ago, it would be pretty hard for them to be present at the big bang.

T2K · Post by **T2K** » 3rd Sep, '10, 09:46

I think in his earlier works he still felt the need to leave the god option open, though he didn't personally believe it. You know, the "here's how it all worked, this must be how god did it" but noow he doesn't.

The comments on the Yahoo story were depressing to me, since most were obviously American and the religious nutjob quotient was high. One said that he must be bitter towards god since god didn't answer his prayers to heal him, pages of stuff like that.

Lili Von Shtupp · Post by **Lili Von Shtupp** » 3rd Sep, '10, 09:51

T2K wrote:One said that he must be bitter towards god since god didn't answer his prayers to heal him, pages of stuff like that.

Sigh. And they wonder why some of us don't want to drink their Kool Aid.

Fat Bob · Post by **Fat Bob** » 3rd Sep, '10, 11:46

Hmmmm....I now believe that random amino acids, and from them random peptides were made from teh primordial soup.

I'm unclear how the universe was formed: if it started at teh big bang, and simple physics say that matter can not be created, then surely something must have been there before the big bang happened?

I'm also unclear on how those simple peptides formed proteins and then, through various levels of formation, mutation, evolution nd a glint in my father's eye, formed me.

And if there is a higher being: when and how did their primordial soup get created and who created them?

Burbage · Post by **Burbage** » 3rd Sep, '10, 16:50

All the matter of the universe was compressed into a big ball before the Big Bang FB, that's the theory anyway. In effect, at some point in the future gravity will be stronger than the remnant energy from the big bang and the universe will start contracting again until it's a great big lump, then the forces that are generated as the matter start accumulating will cause another big bang. Essentially the universe sterilises itself every 1000 billion years or so.

Who knows?

But we are here, which means that life on this planet evolved from a situation where there was no life. So either it evolved spontaneously or it arrived from some other part of the galaxy. But it wasn't 'made' by anyone. Although we can now make simple organisms from scratch and send them out into space, and maybe some day they'll land on a planet where they can evolve. Does that make us gods? Those little bugs might think it does once they've gone though 3.5 billion years of evolution, but we're not going to be in any position to answer their prayers.

But somewhere, perhaps even only once in the universe, life evolved from nothing.

The problem for the religious is not the origin of life. It's the fear of death. they are relying on their god to give them eternal life so that they don't have to die. If Genesis is a lie, well perhaps eternal life is a lie too. That's what they're afraid of.

Joseph27 · Post by **Joseph27** » 3rd Sep, '10, 17:33

The pantheist tradition of god and the universe being identical is fine for me, something we can surely philosophize about but a concept far removed from the personal god which is in no way defensible or indeed logical. The greatest minds in history have obliterated this personal god but alas the most cunning, i.e. those of the religious and those who make money charlatans’ pretending to be religious, profit by maintaining this superstition.

I have this ongoing discussion with people who claim a deep belief in a personal god – their argument is that god is all powerful and knows all; Muslim’s often say insya’allah – ‘god willing’, and their lives are blessed and cursed by this invisible dictator in the sky, a dictator that condemns you for physical as well thought crimes. Now for some of these people, they have great lives so it is easy to see the love of their personal god in their words, and quite often their deeds. However that god personified in the Christmas nativity scene also manifested itself in concentration camps on the Pakistani border in the 1970’s, that personal god took on the hatred and contempt inside that camp, it shunned music and joy, it was a vile poison that later became the Taliban.

T2K – I read the same comments, it is amazing how people can happily make the hateful comments they do and believe they are serving the interest of a loving personal god. The world is a crazy place

Burbage · Post by **Burbage** » 3rd Sep, '10, 17:35

With or without religion people will be good or evil. But religion makes it possible for good people to do evil things.

Addadude · Post by **Addadude** » 3rd Sep, '10, 20:10

If I'm not mistaken, according to Hawking, the universe as we know it did indeed expand from 'nothing'. In his 'A Brief History of Time' he describes his use of his own mathematical model, 'imaginary time', to explain how this might have happened. Even in that 20+ year old book he had already determined that, as far as he was concerned, there was no need for a god to get things rolling.

In terms of the universe eventually contracting backwards into another vast ball of unimaginable energy and restarting the whole process again, scientists have been pretty divided. While many scientists have held to the recurring big bang model that you described, many believe that the universe will keep on expanding, gradually cooling until it eventually runs out of energy. The most recent study on this, using a "galactic lens", (as reported by the BBC) has concluded that the Universe will indeed probably expand forever. Actually, it's a rather depressing thought...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11030889

Burbage · Post by **Burbage** » 3rd Sep, '10, 20:29

Yes read that.

Still, what happened before 5 billion years ago and what is going to happen after another 1000 billion years is anyone's guess. The only thing we can be certain of is that an old bloke with a big white beard isn't going to be fixing it.

Fat Bob · Post by **Fat Bob** » 3rd Sep, '10, 21:19

So if you don't know what happened 5 billion years ago, why are you certain an old bloke with big white beard didn't do it?

Burbage · Post by **Burbage** » 4th Sep, '10, 07:21

Because five billion years ago he hadn't been invented.

Fat Bob · Post by **Fat Bob** » 4th Sep, '10, 08:07

Ah, there's the arrogance of your thoughts, and it's never becoming.

I seem to remember you being a scientist. Scientists should approach things with an open mind. At the moment there is evidence to suggest things moved one way, but no one studied what happened 5 billion years ago, so there is no record. As far as I know, no one has started an experiment which is going to take 5 billion years to complete to recreate what happened on earth.

Therefore, the evidence is not unambiguous.

You may be right, and I'm probably with you on the idea, but if you can not keep an open mind and can not unambiguously ;prove your findings with experimental data, then it means there is room for for error in your thoughts.

Well, until Doctor Who makes himself known to us and lets us use his TARDIS to go have a look at the creation of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Burbage · Post by **Burbage** » 4th Sep, '10, 08:21

Well no evidence is no evidence. Let us put it another way:

It is equally likely that God, the Tooth Fairy, Fat Bob, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or a Leprechaun created the universe. Correct? Because the evidence for each of them creating the universe is zero. But since none of them came into existence until humans made them up, it seems that their influence on events five billion years ago is likely to be zero as well.

Another thing that is worth bearing in mind, there is plenty of evidence that these beings were created by humans. There is no evidence of their existence before humans evolved. There is plenty of evidence that they suddenly 'came into existence' after a point where humans evolved.

On the other hand, the laws of physics provide an evidential model for the events that have happened back into the past, up to the moment of the Big Bang. According to Hawking, who understands these things better than me, the whole thing is explainable by physics, without the intervention of either a Fat Bob or a God. What happened before that is impossible to know, probably. We don't even know if the laws of physics were the same before the big bang, which makes the maths a bit hard.

Rosbif71 · Post by **Rosbif71** » 10th Sep, '10, 22:55

If there is a higher being who created that higher being?

sluggo · Post by **sluggo** » 11th Sep, '10, 03:12

Rosbif71 wrote:If there is a higher being who created that higher being?

cromasaig · Post by **cromasaig** » 11th Sep, '10, 04:38

Excellent. So we have every deity for which there is no evidence begat by a Daddy Deity?

Let there be rationality.

BoD · Post by **BoD** » 11th Sep, '10, 09:26

Or maybe FB is the deity of another universe.

akl1951 · Post by **akl1951** » 12th Nov, '10, 02:36

Hawking appears to have wrongly referred to the ‘Big Bang Model’ as viable explanation for origin of the universe in his latest book, ‘The Grand Design’. The said model suffers from numerous inconsistencies.The review paper titled “Big Bang Model? A Critical Review” published in the peer-reviewed US journal, ‘Journal of Cosmology’, modified version of which is posted at the website: http://vixra.org/pdf/1005.0051v8.pdf ,has detailed prominent inconsistencies with the said model. The persisting redshift controversy that has direct bearing on the expanse and age of the universe as pinpointed by several cosmologists from time to time, presence of full-bloomed galaxies with higher metallicity in the very early epoch of the universe, and the presence of superclusters of galaxies and supervoids in the cosmos are some of the unsolved mysteries that remain inexplicable by the Big Bang model. It is ironic that instead of addressing the existing anomalies with the said model, the mainstream cosmologists have taken it to be a prestige issue by perpetuating the status quo. Ironically, Hawking’s immense popularity as a popular science writer hinges on success of Hawking's widely popular book, ‘A Brief History of Time’ which is all about the origin of the universe. Authencity of the information contained in his book depends on the validity of the ‘Big Bang Model’.When the said model itself in mired in deep controversy, what Hawking has been preaching to the world so far is mere a gossip without any iota of truth.

Readers may like to go through the following write-up on the persistent ' redshift controversy ' that has
direct bearing on the expanse and age of the universe, and forms one of the major inconsistencies with the 'Big Bang Model' as viable explanation for the origin of the universe.

As per Hubble’s law, galaxies in the cosmos are observed to recede on account of expansion of universe. However, there remains nagging uncertainty whether the redshift calculated on the basis of Hubble’s law gives true value of the receding galaxies. Some astronomers (Narlikar 1989; Parker 1993; Harrison 1993; Longair 1995) have serious reservations about the authenticity of the galactic velocities catalogued by astronomers using the Hubble’s velocity- distance law, v = Hd. Expansion redshift does not arise from the Doppler effect, nor is the redshift related to velocity by the special relativistic relation, 1+z =[(1+v/c)/(1-v/c)]1/2 (Narlikar 1993). Einstein’s relativistic Doppler formula merely applies to the motion of galaxies through space, it does not apply to the recession of galaxies (Seeds 2007). Moreover, Doppler redshift is bound by the laws of Einstein’s special relativity, which dictates that an object cannot travel faster than the speed of light whereas in the case of cosmological redshift, v > c is possible since the space which separates the objects (e.g. a quasar from the Earth) through a vacuum can expand faster than the speed of light.

Under the cosmological redshift interpretation, galaxies are not receding simply by a physical velocity in the direction away from the observer; instead, the intervening space is expanding, which accounts for large-scale isotropy of the effect demanded by the cosmological principle (Harrison 1981). In the current cosmological model (Gray and Davies 2008), cosmological redshift z(cos) is described as the observable time-dependent cosmic scale factor (a), governed by the expression, 1+z(cos)= a(now)/a(then). Bondi (1947) defined cosmological redshift as the summation of the Doppler shift due to an object’s motion through space, and the global gravitational shift (Einstein effect) due to the difference between the potential energy per unit mass at the source and the observer. Mathematically, cosmological redshift is expressed as z(cos) = z(dop)+ z(grav), where 1+ z(cos) =[(1+v/c)/(1-v/c)]1/2 (1+∆Ф/c2), and ∆Ф is the difference in gravitational potential between the points of emission and reception of a photon, which hints at the Doppler shift not being the correct measure of distance between the source and the observer. Wrongly computed redshift gives false picture of the expanse and age of the distant galaxies.

Some astrophysical observations (Burbidge 1973; Field 1974) have also raised doubts whether the large redshifts (Hubble redshift) related to the distant galaxies are due entirely to cosmological expansion. The strongest argument (Field et al. 1973) in favour of cosmological expansion is that there is no known hypothesis consistent with laws of physics (other than Doppler shift hypothesis) that can explain the observed redshifts. Crawford (1979) provides alternate explanation to the problem - the interaction of photon with curved space-time causes it to lose energy in the form of very low energy secondary photons, giving rise to the phenomenon of redshift. Marmet (1990) too was of the opinion that the cosmic redshifts could be explained without invoking the Doppler interpretation. According to him, photon, in its passage from a distant galaxy to the observer on the earth, loses some of its energy to the intergalactic medium. As such, the greater the depth of the intergalactic medium between a galaxy and the observer, the more its light gets shifted toward the low-energy (red) end of the spectrum (Marmet and Reber 1989). Interactions of photons with atoms in the intergalactic medium always result in the production of secondary photon (bremsstrahlung photon) at longer wavelength (Jauch and Rohrlich 1980). Julia (2009)too has attributed cosmological redshift of distant galaxies to the loss of energy of the photon with time through transfer of its energy (heat) to the intergalactic space whereby redshift is shown to increase exponentially with the distance, z = e(H/c)d . These ideas suggest that the distant quasars might be much closer to the Earth than their redshift would indicate if they have an ‘intrinsic redshift’ due to their being surrounded by a ‘fuzzy’ atmosphere containing free electrons and other material. This concentration of electrons produces the unusual redshift as the light travels through it, and loses energy to these electrons by the Compton effect (Grey and Davies 2008).

Ashwini Kumar Lal, New Delhi

Morrolan · Post by **Morrolan** » 12th Nov, '10, 07:01

and your point is?

BoD · Post by **BoD** » 12th Nov, '10, 07:13

Well that wins the prize for the longest first post

But the universe is still expanding right? Just not as fast as might have been thought

"intergalactic medium" sounds like a bit of a fudge to me. A new age version of The Ether?

akl1951 · Post by **akl1951** » 17th Dec, '10, 02:15

I have been vehemently opposing validity of the inflationary Big Bang Model as viable explanation for the origin of the universe due to numerous unattended inconsistencies with the said model. The persisting redshift controversy which has direct bearing on the expanse and the age of the universe, presence of superclusters of galaxies in the cosmos interpersed with supervoids,as also the presence of mature galaxies with higher metallicity in the very early epoch of the universe are some of the unresolved puzzles that remain inexplicable by the Big Bang Model. The review paper titled “Big Bang Model? A Critical Review” published in the peer-reviewed US journal, ‘Journal of Cosmology’, modified version of which is posted at the website:
http://vixra.org/pdf/1005.0051v8.pdf has detailed prominent inconsistencies with the said model.

As far as the current status of the theories of origin of universe is concerned,there prevails utter confusion and uncertainty about validity of the different theories propounded by diffferent cosmologists over past four decades. A joint paper by Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking published in 1970 advocated a 'big bang singularity' based on the interpretation of Einstein's general relativity, which eventually became the basis for acceptance of the Big Bang Model by the mainstream cosmologists. But then, of late Penrose has been advocating the concept of 'conformal cyclic universe' in a bid to explain what preceded the Big Bang. Acccording to the cyclic universe model,universe undergoes an endless sequence of cycles in which it contracts in a big crunch and re-emerges in an expanding big bang, with trillions of years of evolution in-between. The concept of 'initial singulaity' and the so called official age of universe as 13.75 billion years as per the WMAP-based latest estimate hardly have any relevance in the context of the cyclic model. the universe is eternal in the cyclic model. Penrose does not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang, rather the Big Bang was in fact just one in a series of many, with each Big Bang marking the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe.He is of the view that the inflationary picture cannot account for very low entropy state in which the universe was believed to have been born.

Steinhardt and Turok are the other prominent advocates of the cyclic model.They have proposed a cosmological model in which instead of having an inflationary epoch wherein there is there is very rapid cosmic acceleration shortly after the Big Bang, each cycle includes a period of slow accelerated expansion (as recently observed)followed by contraction that produces homogeneity, flatness, and energy needed to begin the nexy cycle.Space and time exist forever in the cyclic model, meaning therby that that the universe is eternal.Temperature and density at the transition remain finite in the Steinhardt - Turok model. In the said cyclic model, two parallel M-branes collide periodically in a higher dimensional space. The visible four-dimensional universe lies on one of these branes. The colisions correspond to a reversal from contraction to expansion. The matter and radiation we see today were generated during the most recent collision in a pattern dictated by quantum fluctuations created before branes' collision. In the said model, single energy field replaces inflation and dark energy perceived in the current inflationary Big Bang model in such a way as to sometimes cause expansion and sometimes a recollapse. Notwithstanding the potential the cyclic model has in removig the inconsistencies currently observed in the largely accepted inflationary Big Bang model, mechanism of the colliding branes remins to be satisfactorily explained by the string theorists to the level of acceptance by the mainstream cosmologists.

Sardonicus · Post by **Sardonicus** » 17th Dec, '10, 04:54

Similar posts found here: http://www.politics.ie/education-scienc ... html?pp=40

akl1951 · Post by **akl1951** » 19th Dec, '10, 01:07

I have gone through three books titled, ‘ A Brief History of Time’, ‘The Theory of Everything’, and
‘The Grand Design’ – all authored by the celebrated scientist, Stephen Hawking. I find content of all his books to be more or less the same with minor variation here and there. I fail to comprehend why Hawking has been repeating the same thing again and again. Repeated mention of the Big Bang Model as viable explanation for the origin of the universe does not convince intelligent readers about its validity in the light of several unattended inconsistencies with the said model.

Ashwini Kumar Lal

Spike · Post by **Spike** » 19th Dec, '10, 09:24

Rosbif71 wrote:If there is a higher being who created that higher being?

Actually in ancient religious legend the highest being was always female, i.e. the mother of all Gods. Which would mean that if Jesus really was married, his wife would have one heck of an interfering grandmother in law.

The Singapore Forum

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking

Re: The Grand Design Stephen Hawking