UNIVERSAL SECRETS
This set of 10 essays, dealing with big questions, was published after the author’s death. Every sentence contains that trademark combination of extreme clarity of thought, devastating honesty and crackling humour. Several of those questions cannot be answered definitely by science, so the essays express the cosmologist’s personal opinions.
The money quote from the first essay, ‘Is there a God?’, defines his attitude to religion. “The simplest explanation is that there is no god. Nobody created the universe and nobody directs our fate. There is no rational evidence for an afterlife... but we do live on in our influence and in the genes we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and, for that, I am extremely grateful.”
Between the science and the philosophy, there are delicious interpolations. “There is the possibility that England might win the World Cup again in some Multiverse but the probability isn’t very high.” Or Little Green Men might do better than humans because “the human race does not have a very good record when it comes to intelligent behaviour”. Or, there may be a chronology protection agency preventing time travel, in order to give job security to historians (but time travel can’t be ruled out). There are the provocations such as the assertion that computer viruses fit the definition of life and that it isn’t obvious if intelligence is a useful evolutionary trait.
Some of the musing is prophetic. He foresaw the fact that human genetic engineering would happen—vide Nana and Lulu, and that a superhuman subspecies could lead to unimproved humans eventually being shoved aside. When it comes to meeting intelligent aliens (and he did think there was a fair possibility of that), we may be in the same position as the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus & Co.
There is the contained excitement of the great scientist, when he writes
about his special area of interest— black holes. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) provided the experimental verification of black hole merger and collapse, creating gravitational waves. But Stephen Hawking died with the information paradox unresolved—do black holes conserve or destroy information? We don’t know.
Beyond the humour and the karmic acceptance, there is real concern about our future. Will we destroy ourselves and our planet? Will we create artificial intelligence that destroys us? Open-ended questions that he speculated about.
Let’s end with two quotes. “At the age of 21, I was told that I had about five years to live. So, as I turn 76, I am acutely aware of the passage of time and I have lived with the sense that my time was, as they say, borrowed.” And finally, “However difficult life may be, there is always something that you can succeed at. Unleash your imagination, Shape the future.”
“However difficult life may be, there is always something that you can succeed at. Unleash your imagination, Shape the future”