Modern physics leaves no place for God in the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded in a new work entitled: "The Grand Design", co-authored by American physicist Leonard Mlodinow.
In the new work to be released September 9th, Professor Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity, contesting Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have created out of chaos.
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," Hawking writes. "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."
Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have risen from chaos was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.
Hawking resigned as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University last year after 30 years in the position, a post previously held by Newton.
More from Alan Boyle at MSNBC.
4 comments:
Can the Prof answer the very simple question: Who put the law of Gravity in place including the things Gravity operated upon? His conclusion, in my opinion just shows the smallness of human mind in the space of Creation.
@Fermi A:
Exactly. The universe naturally flows from gravity... so now where does gravity come from? etc...
It may be a contrarian viewpoint, but I believe that energy and linear-angular momentum can not be created nor destroyed, ergo the universe is infinite in time without a beginning or an end....which means that intelligence has had an infinite time to evolve in it. I believe that the beginning and the ultimate ends of intelligence is the cyclical essence of abstract mathematics which becomes more abstract when entropy levels are high and becomes more physical when entropy levels decrease.
I noticed that Richard Dawkins makes the statement that "verbal intelligence has only evolved once". However, most if not all animals use chit chat to communicate information with each other. I view intelligence as any means by which species recieve, process, and react to data though, so perhaps it is just a matter of semantics.
Post a Comment