Excerpt from Stephen Hawking Smoked My Socks, chapter 2: Cogito, Ergo, Sum (by Hilton Ratcliffe, Muse Harbor Publishing, 2014) We cannot possibly exaggerate the importance of Newton’s example to the progress of science. Despite being a deeply religious man with some quaintly metaphysical hobbies, Isaac Newton was able to practise physics more purely than anyone else in history. That he could so objectively set aside his philosophical convictions to look at the world as a material machine in conventional space sets him apart from his peers, in my opinion. We might infer from his approach to physics what could have been Newton’s Zeroth Law—that the success of physical science in describing truth is inversely proportional to the application of belief by the scientist. The rest of my book is focussed single-mindedly on exploring this assertion and the implications it has for humanity. Science progresses by exploring the unknown, finding the unexpected, and being challenged by sceptics. The quest for knowledge is a search for things we don’t already know. It is, when all is said and done, an exploration of our ignorance. Let’s get that straight before I go on to lay my opinions out to dry. More intelligence can be found in a single atom than I would acquire in a thousand lifetimes. It follows from my assertion, therefore, that questions I may ask in science are in fact an expression of my ignorance—that is, a desire to learn what I do not already know—than as a tool to demonstrate how clever I am. Asking questions to prove rhetorically that I am right and someone else is wrong will severely limit my progress. It would be no more than an exercise in unbridled egotism, to say nothing of an iniquitous waste of time and creativity. Having grasped that, my philosophical mission is to try to see myself to scale. In an infinite Universe, we will always be infinitely more ignorant than we are wise. Notwithstanding whatever philosophical uncertainties may remain, the very act of accepting the logical certainty of infinite dimensions of space and time relieves a lot of the pressure we feel from exploring an intimidating cosmos. Questions like how did it begin? and who created it? fall away, and we can concentrate on figuring out the useful intricacies of more knowable things like gravitation and the pleasures of Ceylon tea. Think about it; what do we see? Try as we might, we find no sign of a beginning or an end, nor do we observe linear universal evolution. The macro universe seems to be an apparently endless series of local cycles. Stars are born, live, and die, and from their ashes new stars appear. The nascent stars mature into the same form as the stars that went before them. Anything that reproduces itself consistently must have a concomitant template that constrains the offspring. In order to properly understand the form and behaviour of the progeny, we need to try to establish to what degree and in what ways its behaviour is chemically directed by the progenitor, and how much is chaotic effects or free will.
Posted on: Sat, 10 May 2014 16:06:49 +0000
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