http://www.isepp.org/Pages/Hawking/Hawking2005.html
Not listed on his public tour schedule is Prof. Hawking's private appearance at Intel giving the same lecture, "The Origin of the Universe," today, November 11. I'll post impressions after he finishes.
Stephen Hawking
-
Jonathan
- Grand Pooh-Bah
- Posts: 6722
- Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:45 pm
- Location: Portland, OR
- Contact:
Hawking gives a multimedia talk!
"What was God doing before he made the world? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?"
There were more pauses than you might have guessed. I suppose he has sentences queued up and chooses which ones he wants to use.
TV snow is partially due to the cosmic microwave background radiation.
"I didn't fancy being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo." Couldn't get a screenshot of Hawking in the Inquisition.
"We are products of quantum irregularities in the early universe. God really does play dice."
Hawking is willing to ask the question of whether the universe will collapse, although he might have meant it rhetorically. I thought it was fairly settled that the universe will keep on expanding, but I guess not.
No live questions for this show, but it sounds like other shows he does do live questions. Instead, they're doing canned questions.
"What was God doing before he made the world? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?"
There were more pauses than you might have guessed. I suppose he has sentences queued up and chooses which ones he wants to use.
TV snow is partially due to the cosmic microwave background radiation.
"I didn't fancy being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo." Couldn't get a screenshot of Hawking in the Inquisition.
"We are products of quantum irregularities in the early universe. God really does play dice."
Hawking is willing to ask the question of whether the universe will collapse, although he might have meant it rhetorically. I thought it was fairly settled that the universe will keep on expanding, but I guess not.
No live questions for this show, but it sounds like other shows he does do live questions. Instead, they're doing canned questions.
-
Jonathan
- Grand Pooh-Bah
- Posts: 6722
- Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:45 pm
- Location: Portland, OR
- Contact:
Essentially, his current working theory says that minor fluctuations in uh, I guess, energy(?) before the universe began created little miniuniverses that collapsed immediately. Ours is a universe that beat the odds and kept on existing. Or something like that. Like I said, I kinda missed that part. I'll see if the webcast gets posted someplace.
Yeah, there was a cosmology lecture at CMU as part of the colloquiem I was required to go to. The professor said that the probability of the universe having enough enough energy not to collapse upon itself instantly (well, within a very short time), but not enough to fly apart completely in that same time is incredibly small.
It sounds like Hawking believes in a sort of natural selection origin with randomization eventually producing a survivable universe. However, the lecture I was at raised an interesting point to think about. What if there was some as-yet-unobserved force that altered the probability density to make a univese like ours more probable? Not necessarily God, though that's one possibility. It' more like when you think of the human body on a microscopic scale, we're made up of a bunch of chemical reactions going the wrong way. It's only when you look at a higher level that you can see that many different reactions are interacting with one another to hold the entire system in an otherwise impossible equilibrium. I'm beginning to wonder if there is some higher-order layer of physics helping these otherwise statistically impossible processes to occur. Damn, that sounds dangerously close to intelligent design, though from a completely different direction. Convergent evolution at work. Ok, enough. Off to pick up my Czech VZ24 from UPS.
It sounds like Hawking believes in a sort of natural selection origin with randomization eventually producing a survivable universe. However, the lecture I was at raised an interesting point to think about. What if there was some as-yet-unobserved force that altered the probability density to make a univese like ours more probable? Not necessarily God, though that's one possibility. It' more like when you think of the human body on a microscopic scale, we're made up of a bunch of chemical reactions going the wrong way. It's only when you look at a higher level that you can see that many different reactions are interacting with one another to hold the entire system in an otherwise impossible equilibrium. I'm beginning to wonder if there is some higher-order layer of physics helping these otherwise statistically impossible processes to occur. Damn, that sounds dangerously close to intelligent design, though from a completely different direction. Convergent evolution at work. Ok, enough. Off to pick up my Czech VZ24 from UPS.