Brief Answers to the Big Questions: When Stephen Hawking asserted there's no God
The human mind today is still far too small to imagine the extraordinary answers the future will uncover.
Does God exist? How did the Universe begin? Is there intelligent life in outer space?
Celebrated theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who died earlier this year after battling motor neurone disease for over five decades which left him almost completely paralysed, tries to answer these fundamental questions in his new book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, published posthumously.
Does he do so satisfactorily? Of that, in a moment.
While at university reading physics and mathematics, I submitted a three-part cover story to The Illustrated Weekly of India, then edited by Khushwant Singh, on the near-certainty of intelligent life existing in the Universe.
Khushwant Singh looked incredulously at me, a 20-year-old undergrad, but being the expansive editor he passed on my three-piece cover story to RGK (RG Gopalkrishnan), the Weekly’s formidable assistant editor who sat outside Khushwant’s cabin alongside the other two assistant editors, Fatma Zakaria and Raju Bharatan.
To cut a long story short, RGK told me to make a few changes and said sternly that the Weekly had never before carried three consecutive cover stories by anyone, but (his eyes now twinkling) he would make an exception this time.
The cover story asked questions that have fascinated scientists and philosophers for centuries: not only how the universe began but why, and the most fundamental question of all: what existed before the universe began at the nano-moment before “time-zero” when “nothing” existed.
It is at this point of singularity, where time and space first come into existence, that questions about God and the purpose of the Universe arise. This is where science and religion meet – though from opposite directions.
Hawking spent decades trying to understand the concept of “nothingness” – the absolute vacuum before the Big Bang created the Universe around 13.8 billion years ago when time and space did not exist.
In his new book, Hawking continues to wrestle with the idea of nothingness. He writes: “Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began. To understand this mind-boggling idea, consider a black hole floating in space. A typical black hole is a star so massive that it has collapsed in on itself. It’s so massive that not even light can escape its gravity, which is why it’s almost perfectly black. Its gravitational pull is so powerful, it warps and distorts not only light but also time.”
About God, Hawking is more certain: there isn’t one. We came from nothing at the point of singularity 13.80 billion years ago when time and space began, but Hawking leaves us tantalisingly short of answers.
What is the purpose of the universe? Why was it created and by whom? Hawking rules out God, but doesn’t offer a substitute except to call it “nature”. Which is why his book is slightly underwhelming.
To examine the extraordinary sequence of events that might have taken place at “time-zero”, the moment of creation, I wrote an op-ed in The Times of India in August 2010 titled, The Intelligent Universe:
“Our universe was created at time-zero – the point of ‘singularity’ at which there was nothing: no matter, no space, no time. Within this absolute space-time vacuum (postulated by the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems based on Einstein's general theory of relativity), an event occurred which no leading scientist has yet been able to fully explain. That event probably involved the mutual annihilation of a positron-electron twin pair carrying identical (positive and negative) charges and mass. The result of this vacuum fluctuation was the Big Bang, the widely accepted theory of how our universe began.
“Before time-zero, during the pre-universe ‘nothingness’, it is hypothesised that constant and instantaneous mutual annihilation of positron-electrons pairs occurred several trillion times every second. These multiple collisions cancelled each other out, leading to a perpetual state of zero mass, zero time and zero space – the perfect vacuum. The mutual annihilation of electrons and positrons, however, occurred in unimaginably small crevices of time.
“To the observer, nothing was occurring. The event started and ended before it could be observed and therefore, as far as the observer was concerned, had not occurred at all. From this nothingness a freak, once-in-a-quadrillion positron-electron pair escaped mutual annihilation 13.80 billion years ago, causing the Big Bang and the creation of our universe as well as a ‘mirror’ negative universe.”
None of this can be proved empirically, but unless we examine all possibilities that could have led to the creation of the Universe from apparent nothingness, we will never come even close to the truth.
The other fundamental question that confronts mankind offers fascinating possibilities: Is there intelligent life in other parts of the cosmos?
The answer is clearly ‘yes’ — there is every likelihood of life, intelligent or otherwise, existing in different corners of the vast number of galaxies the Universe contains.
On this point, Hawking is certain.
He writes: “What are the chances that we will encounter some alien form of life as we explore our galaxy? If the argument about the timescale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, there ought to be many other stars whose planets have life on them.”
The chances are overwhelming that not only has intelligent life evolved elsewhere in the universe, but one day we will establish contact with it – or vice versa. It will by definition be a superior form of life, not necessarily based on the same carbon molecules life on earth is largely composed of.
This though begs the question: why has intelligent life in the universe not made contact with us?
The answer lies in the unimaginable vastness of the universe. Travelling at the speed of light (3,00,000km per second), an electromagnetic signal from a planet in Andromeda (our nearest galaxy) would take 2.54 million years to reach earth. Simply put, we are too far away and too insignificant to interest an advanced civilisation capable of inter-galactic travel.
That doesn’t mean extra-terrestrial contact will never occur, but simply that time, in cosmic terms, is measured in tens of thousands of years.
Just as our mammal ancestors a million years ago couldn’t imagine a future world with the internet, the human mind today is still far too small to imagine the extraordinary answers the future will uncover.