Hawking on Theories of Everything

Hawking on Theories of Everything

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19391-hawking-hasnt-changed-his-mind-about-god.html

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/09/stephen-hawking-says-theres-no-theory-of-everything.html



It seems the pendulum swings on if there is a unified theory of the universe or not- americans at Churchill felt it all was an uncertain quantum randomness when I was one of the few ones who keep an interest in a unified theory of everything - that was around 1967. In a sense Fred Hoyle and his steady state which did not seem to require the hypothesis of a God (he was an atheist) by his creation fields had such a theory much like what Hawking seems to have understood now in his new book saying a God is not needed for the universe to be created. One way or the other the old pantheism of spinoza, a sort of distant and non-personal God seems to be some ultimate limit to our notions of the richness and size of the cosmos.

But Old Einstein has been called one with errors in the search for a unified theory, a sort of game and futility beyond his notions as a younger man.

What I think is that Hawking, (despite the idea of bringing any sort of God into the picture, perhaps to sell books as in his excellent "God made the Intergers") is in fact and as much as the Creationist, Intelligent Designers, is giving us a theory of everything by the very statement there cannot be such a theory and that there is no such God, distant or personal. He is giving us what seems the ultimate contradiction or maybe just a never resolved paradox- but as I have said, if he is like the quantum cat maybe for him he can assure us there is no light at the end of a tunnel. Hawkings was our last great modern physicists and our first great post-modern physicist. But the pendulum does swing back to our generation's astrologies.