- Included in the Stephen Hawking Posts List.
- I would have thought that by now, scientists who are so determined to drive God out of the picture would have a much better explanation than this.
Martin Winfree
September 30, 2024 ·
Shared with Public
Here I go again, just can’t seem to leave Stephen Hawking alone, can I? I’m really not picking on Stephen Hawking; I have unending respect and admiration for his genius, and how he was able to make an incredibly fulfilling life while being unable to move for many years. This is really how most scientists see it, not just Hawking.
I saw an enjoyable 2012 miniseries the other night called Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design that has only three episodes. Predictably, in the final episode, Stephen Hawking discussed Creation; and how with all of the unchangeable Laws of Nature and so forth that scientists now know, there is no need for a God to be there to create the Universe. The explanation seemed facile and not compelling at all from my perspective; I was talking back to the TV much of the time.
To my way of thinking, the discussion in that show proved that science really has no idea at all of how the Universe came to be; so in order to keep God out of the picture, they have trivialized the whole thing. Essentially, and supposedly, the principles of quantum mechanics allow the Universe to have simply spontaneously appeared all on its own; as Stephen Hawking put it: “The Universe is the ultimate free lunch.” Yeah, right.
Stephen Hawking talked about “virtual particles” that the principles of quantum mechanics say are popping in and out of existence continuously, as he did in his later book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, which I have discussed at length in other posts several years ago. Nobody has ever seen a virtual particle or measured one.
But Hawking took it a step further on Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design and mentioned that, at the time of the Big Bang, the Universe was incredibly compressed to the size of a proton. So, Stephen Hawking said that the Universe pops into existence, and then the Big Bang happens, and there we are. Basically, what you do is look at the expanding universe that we now live in and turn back the clock; and everything comes back to an infinitesimal point, possibly even a singularity that completely violates the laws of physics.
Wow, where do I begin? First, all we have to go on as to the Creation of the Universe are theories; so to pretend that scientists have it all figured out is disingenuous in the extreme. The Big Bang has been pretty durable as theories go, but it has been showing cracks in recent years. In any case, if the Universe were the SIZE of a proton at the time of the Big Bang, that doesn’t mean that the Universe WAS a proton at the time of the Big Bang. Surely everyone would agree that this is not the same thing at all.
Regarding the densest matter where we have some knowledge, a neutron star, Wikipedia states: “A normal-sized matchbox containing neutron-star material would have a weight of approximately 3 billion tonnes, the same weight as a 0.5-cubic-kilometer chunk of the Earth (a cube with edges of about 800 meters) from Earth’s surface.” Clearly, a regular matchbox and that hypothetical matchbox full of neutron-star material are not at all the same.
Where this is coming from is that the principles of quantum mechanics do allow for the spontaneous creation of matter out of thin air, but not surprisingly, it is an incredibly rare event. Needless to say, no one has ever seen that happen either. Oh, but it only has to happen once, and then we have our Universe, right? Sure, but these days, most scientists now imagine a “multiverse” with untold billions of other universes also. So, sorry, that dodge doesn’t work; those universes would have to start off the same way.
On this program, Stephen Hawking talked about other concepts that are not explored in Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He talked about something called “negative energy”. They gave an example of someone making a small hill by digging a hole and piling up the dirt. The hole then represents the “negative energy” during the creation of the hill. I looked at the hole and thought that you could call it that if you wanted to, but I really didn’t see the point.
So, in the creation of the Universe, you have the matter that was created that is on the “positive” side; and then on the “negative” side, negative energy represents the gravitational forces between everything. Apparently, the “potential energy” that I was taught in high school is sometimes called “negative energy”. Then Stephen Hawking said that the positive stuff and the negative stuff all balances out or something, so Creation doesn’t really require any effort or something. It all made very little sense to me.
Unlike some of the other forces in the Universe – say, electromagnetism – gravity is always attractive. Everything in the Universe exerts gravity on everything else in the Universe; although it only becomes important with big things like stars and planets, naturally. Why on earth would you call gravity of all things “negative energy”?
Now, there are some aspects of the Universe where this kind of thing is important. For every particle – protons, electrons, even neutrinos – there is a corresponding antiparticle; that has been known for many years. The first to be discovered is the antielectron, which has a positive not a negative charge; so it has a special name, “positron”. The rest just use the “anti” prefix. One major mystery in the Universe is why there is more regular matter than antimatter; there is no particular reason that this should be true. This brings us back to the old conundrum: Why is there something rather than nothing?
I looked up negative energy in Wikipedia, and that pretty much confirms everything that I was thinking when I was watching the show. Negative energy is a “concept” used in physics to explain gravitational fields and some aspects of quantum mechanics. Yes, it is a “concept”, not a real thing that you can measure.
Negative energy is not the same thing as “dark energy” that I have also talked about on earlier posts. The Wikipedia article on dark energy calls it “a proposed form of energy”. I have also previously discussed “dark matter”; the Wikipedia article calls that “a hypothetical form of matter”. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
In summary, I would have thought that by now, scientists who are so determined to drive God out of the picture would have a much better explanation than this. Concepts and suppositions and half-baked theories without a shred of evidence, experimental or otherwise, don’t cut it. An acceptable scientific theory has to be able to explain everything in the theory that it is replacing, plus other questions where the earlier theory comes up short. I’m still waiting.
More coming.