英文:对霍金理论的常识性反对:A theory of everything? Valid in different limits?
发布时间：2006-12-03 12:54
分类名称：默认分类
分类名称：默认分类
The Sunday Times - Review
The Sunday Times December 03, 2006
Give Hawking a medal - but not for his cosmic theory The celebrity physicist is an inspiration to many but his grand statements embarrass the institution of science, argues Bryan Appleyard
Stephen Hawking’s terrible disability combined with the phenomenal power of his mind have made him a global brand as well as the single most extraordinary guest star on both The Simpsons and Star Trek.Hawking in a wheelchair talking through his computer has become the popular embodiment of the word “genius”.
Furthermore, his heroic determination to keep on working at the highest level through the appalling depredations of motor neurone disease is, in itself, a potent symbol of the autonomy of the human imagination. Irrespective of what final contribution he has made to cosmology — something we cannot yet know — he perhaps deserved the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, Britain most important scientific prize, simply for being our age’s emblem of big, adventurous and exciting science.
And yet one very eminent scientist said to me: “He’s a great embarrassment to us.” Many, probably most, scientists feel that these celebrity scientists with their grand statements — Hawking promising a “theory of everything”, Richard Dawkins disproving the existence of God — have become an unwelcome burden for the institution of science.
Science is a humble and, in its way, a very narrow vocation. In spite of the misleading headlines, it has almost nothing to say about human affairs and it has enough problems without restarting a boring old fight with religion. A theory of everything, meanwhile, would change almost nothing about the practice of science and absolutely nothing in the human world. It certainly won’t, as the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once absurdly suggested, stop people reading their horoscopes.
“Science,” said Hawking last week, “after finding the ultimate theory, would be like mountaineering after Everest.” Well, there’s still a lot of mountaineering.
But it is the personality of Hawking that makes him such an intriguing and frequently infuriating figure. I speak from experience: he changed my life.
I interviewed him just before A Brief History of Time made him a world star. I was, at first, awestruck, a condition that subsided rapidly when he simply refused to discuss what was an obvious inaccuracy through gross over-simplification in his book and when, subsequently, his then wife, an Anglican, told me, in a state of some distress, how arrogant and intolerant he had become about religion.
My subsequent, Hawking-inspired sub-career of attempting to unpick the errors and stupidities of all scientistic thinkers led to him calling me in print “a failed intellectual”, a badge I still wear with some pride. After all, what other kind is there?
His later book — The Universe in a Nutshell — was much better than A Brief History, but it contained another egregious error. Hawking had taken the title from some words spoken by Hamlet: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
He says this means we are free to explore the universe despite our physical limitations. In fact, Hamlet meant the opposite. The “infinite space” was an illusion because it was just the inside of the nutshell. This is about mental, not physical, limitation. Shakespeare, at least when writing Hamlet, was incapable of banality.
Trivial, you may say, and it is true that a refusal or inability to read carefully outside his subject is nothing against his physics. But, in fact, I don’t think his science is quite what it seems either. Hawking does not claim any of his theories are true. This is a perfectly respectable scientific position, a form of positivism, in which theories are simply useful tools. The question of whether the latest theory, called M-theory, of the universe is true is meaningless. It is simply an idea that accords with current observation and thought.
But I don’t understand — and nobody has yet succeeded in explaining to me — how, in that case, we could ever claim to have a theory of everything that was in any way final. Hawking gives a glimpse of the philosophical as well as physical complexity of these matters in an answer he gave to The Sunday Times last week.
“All the theories in the M-theory network can be regarded as approximations to the same underlying theory, in different limits. None of the theories allow calculations to arbitrary accuracy and reflections. Instead, they should be regarded as effective theories, valid in different limits.”
At this level it becomes clear that science is very close to philosophy or theology, too close for the comfort of those hard scientistic thinkers who think that only they have the power to unlock the black box of reality. It would take a Wittgenstein, not an Einstein, to decipher the correspondences between such strange words and whatever residue of reality remains.
