The Grand Design

Within 24 hours of its release, I've already purchased and read Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design.  Call me a bit of an eager beaver, but I've been quite excited about it, as indicated in a previous post.  No doubt that Stephen Hawking is an expert in the fields of physics and astrophysics, but more importantly he serves the role as an educator through the medium of popular science.

It is a good read, though I find some of the assumptions slightly short on detail.  Perhaps this lack of detail is a good thing, though: any explanation of M-Theory takes very complicated math and makes my head hurt.  In The Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking explored some of these ideas more thoroughly.  Instead, The Grand Design focuses specifically on questions concerning the existence of the universe.  Specifically:

• Why is there something rather than nothing?
• Why do we exist?
• Why this particular set of laws and not some other?

His assertion is that "it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings."

Without ruining too much of the surprise, the answer lies in something called the strong anthropic principle.  In essence, the set of laws for the universe happen to exist because the conditions for this universe happen to be favorable to them.  The Big Bang, for instance, is not an event, but a coordinate in space-time called the no-boundary condition--no different than asking yourself, if you are on the South Pole, to head "further south," which would be a meaningless designation.

Since this is an ethics and philosophy blog, these new theories are relevant in the following way:

• As Hawking points out, religion has held a traditional role in attempting to explain the mysteries of things.  Over time, these models for the universe have proven themselves less useful than newer models.  For example, the Ptolemaic view of the universe was replaced with the Copernican theory.
• Beliefs such as Creationism, though they cannot necessarily be falsified, require a great deal more effort to explain (fossils--"were they put there to fool us?").
• Hawking asserts "philosophy is dead.  Philosophy has not caught up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.  Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge."  I disagree, at least in one sense: knowledge alone does not constitute ethics.  Without ethical progress, a search for meaning is meaningless.  I would agree that it has not caught up with science, yet the fault lies within our cultural priorities.  But more on this subject later.

Given that the universe is agnostic, there is a lot of ground to cover in the realm of the human experience.  How do we define ethical behavior?  How far do we have the right to exert ourselves?  When is the correct time to intervene, or not intervene?  Science alone cannot answer these questions.