A few days before traditional Jews celebrate the 5,771st anniversary of God’s
creation of the world on Rosh Hashana, eminent British theoretical physicist
Prof. Stephen Hawking has created a stir by declaring that the “Big Bang”
that is believed to have kicked off the creation of the universe “did not need”
a divine being to happen.
A self-described atheist, the 68-year-old
scientist has been paralyzed for decades by amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or
Lou Gehrig’s disease) and can communicate with the world only by batting his
eyelids toward a sensor that turns the movements into electronic
letters.
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An extract of his new book, The Grand Design, was released on
Thursday in The Times of London and presented his views on the Big
Bang.
Hawking, who visited Israel with an entourage of assistants in
December 2006, is known for his controversial opinions.
Among them is his
call for the urgent colonization of another planet or the Moon so that
mankind
will have a place to go after it destroys Earth by pollution or nuclear
catastrophe.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can
and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason
there is
something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,”
Hawking
writes, as a coauthor with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow.
(Both of
Mlodinow’s parents were Holocaust survivors. His father, who spent more
than a
year in Buchenwald, was a leader in the Jewish resistance against the
Nazis in
his hometown of Czestochowa, Poland.
Mlodinow, who currently teaches at
the California Institute of Technology, first became interested in
physics when
he spent time at a kibbutz in the Jerusalem foothills at the end of the
Yom
Kippur War.) “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch
paper
and set the universe going,” Hawking wrote, as part of a new series of
theories
making a creator of the universe “redundant.”
In the new book, he states
that the laws of physics were enough to trigger the Big Bang that made
the
expanding universe and that God was not needed for this.
“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 evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please
us
human beings,” writes Hawking, who recently retired from his
professorship at
Cambridge University that was once held by Sir Isaac Newton.
Hebrew
University physics Prof. Jacob Bekenstein, a religious Jew and leading
theoretical physicist born in Mexico City, who studied black hole
thermodynamics
at the same time that Hawking did and whose work reportedly influenced
the
British scientist, told The Jerusalem
Post on Thursday that Hawking’s new
statements “are a bit simplified. We learn things about the universe
from
watching and conducting experiments, but we are limited and can err
about
physical laws. He has reached a grandiose conclusion that even many
non-believer
scientists would agree is too much.”
Asked why he thought Hawking had
suddenly come out with a book on the subject, Bekenstein suggested: “He
is a
known atheist, from the time I first met him in the 1970s when he was
able to
communicate by saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ His care is very expensive, so he
lives
from his books and other projects. It’s not hard for him to get
attention and
publish.”
Bekenstein added that “many more people around the world would
agree with his call for colonization of the Moon or an extraterrestrial
planet
than with his statement that God need not have been involved in the
creation of
the universe, although many people still would agree” on the
latter.
Whether God created the universe or not is “not a pure scientific
problem. The Big Bang of creation used to be very central in theoretical
physics, but today, people don’t make an issue of it.”
Bekenstein added
that he doesn’t believe a new universe could be launched in a lab by
meeting the
specific conditions believed to have occurred before the Big Bang.
“If it
were possible in nature, with existing energies, it would have, but it
didn’t,
as far as we know. Scientists at the particle accelerator under Geneva
are
trying to understand some aspects of the Big Bang, but they can’t create
all the
conditions and exactly reproduce them,” he said.
Prof. Hagai Netzer, a
secular physicist at Tel Aviv University who also met Hawking during his
visit
here, said: “The main question is what Hawking means. He apparently is
saying
that the physical laws that run our world make it possible for the
creation of a
new universe with our existing means. We know a lot about it, but not
all. In
general, I agree with him, that creation could occur spontaneously
without
divine intervention. We physicists don’t know all the details necessary;
maybe
in the future we will find some conditions are missing. Yet, if we have
all the
necessary conditions, maybe a new universe could appear.”
Netzer added
that “God is beyond the natural laws. We are talking about the laws of
nature,
and there is no connection between them and religion.”
Observant Jewish
theoretical physicists constitute about about a fifth of the few dozen
in this
country who work in the field.
“There has not been any argument between
the secular and the religious on science. I highly value Prof.
Bekenstein, my
university colleague Prof. Zvi Mazeh and others who are religious.
Religion is a
personal belief, and it doesn’t prevent the observant from going into
this
field,” Netzer said.
Prof. Elia Leibowitz of TAU’s School of Physics and
Astronomy told the Post that he
agreed with Hawking in general about the Big
Bang, “but not on everything,” and strongly supported his views on the
need to
colonize parts of outer space, “because we are destroying
ourselves.”
Leibowitz, the son of the late Orthodox Israeli scientist and
philosopher Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz and nephew of the late
world-famous
Orthodox biblical scholar Prof. Nechama Leibowitz, said he himself is an
atheist
and not religious at all, even though he grew up in a very observant
home.
“From time immemorial, every time people find some major phenomenon
they don’t understand, there is always the explanation that God did it.
When the
Greeks wanted to explain the rising and setting sun, they claimed that
the god
Helius did it. If we don’t understand the world and the Big Bang, many
people
say God is the answer.”
But, added Leibowitz, “the history of human
knowledge proves that this explanation is not good enough. It doesn’t
advance
our knowledge about this at all.”
He added that he does not personally
know Hawking, but “I guess he sees what is going on in the world –
fundamentalism is spreading. People reach a lot of conclusions that are
dangerous; think of Iran, al-Qaida. They want to blow up the
world.
There is harmful extremism among Jews as well that can be
harmful.”
Leibowitz added: “I don’t say I have all the explanations on
how the universe began. I don’t know many things. We learn a bit more as
time
passes.”
He does not recall arguing with his father, who had
controversial views about Orthodoxy and wrote that the sole purpose of
religious
commandments was to obey God and not to receive any kind of reward in
this world
or the world to come.
“I think he would agree with Hawking about the Big
Bang and God, but my aunt Nechama – that would be an entirely different
thing.”
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