God, the universe & everything

Donal O’Donoghue on the final book from the great Stephen Hawking

Is there a God? To some, Stephen Hawking was a god, the greatest scientific mind since Albert Einstein and the man who first made some sense of black holes. Of course, Hawking himself would probably harrumph at such praise and not only because he didn’t believe in god or an afterlife. The world’s foremost cosmologist and a global celebrity, died last March and his ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey, between two of his heroes, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Yet he lives on in his work, with some of his essays, lectures and speeches collated into the posthumously published Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

The big questions in this slim book include such headscratchers as ‘Is There a God?’, ‘How Did It All Begin?’ and

‘Is Time Travel Possible?’ In many cases, the answers are far from conclusive (science has yet to catch up) but Hawking makes compelling arguments, stimulating further queries and cracking a few dry jokes along the way. In his introduction, US scientist Kip S Thorne reiterates some lines from his eulogy at his friend’s interment at Westminster: “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions.” Those lines resonate throughout this book.

Between a foreword by the actor Eddie Redmayne (who played Hawking in the 2014 biopic, The Theory of Everything) and an afterword by his daughter, Lucy Hawking, we get the great man’s wit and wisdom (“If there are beings alive on Alpha Centauri today they remain blissfully ignorant of the rise of Donald Trump”). In the chapter ‘Will Artificial Intelligence Outsmart Us?’, Hawking argues that we should look more to the future and not the past with the line, “We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity.”

In the latter part of the book there is much repetition, either a case of sloppy editing or a determination to hammer home a point in a read that is very accessible. Hawking believed that any visitors from another planet will be more like the malevolent forces of Independence Day, rather than benign beings like ET. He scoffed at the notion that aliens have already dropped by and is adamant that space must be colonised if humanity is to survive. Brief Answers does not have all the answers or even all the questions but it is a work of science and imagination that packs a powerful punch. As soon as I finished I went back to the beginning. Is there a God? *

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking (John Murray)