Stephen Hawking is Such a Troublemaker

[HarveyDarkey]

Analysis by Ian O'Neill
Sun Sep 5, 2010 06:17 AM ET

The Universe: No God required.

If this opinion came from the Pope, then we'd have a major scoop on our hands. Alas, it didn't.

Stephen Hawking, British physicist (and, apparently, troublemaker) makes this statement in his new book, The Grand Design, that went on shelves on Thursday. Needless to say, it has taken the media by storm.

ANALYSIS: Stephen Hawking's Time Machine

In the book -- with the quasi-religious title, you may have noticed -- Hawking says that he doesn't believe a God lit "the blue touch paper and set the Universe going." The Universe formed from "nothing" and we need only physics to describe what really happened 13.75 billion years ago.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist," he writes.

The UK's Times website (subscription only) is serializing Hawking's book, and they obviously thought the news was groundbreaking. "Hawking: God did not create universe" was the headline.

To put it bluntly, so what? Is this sentiment really a surprise considering Hawking evaporates black holes for a living? Also, he is definitely not the first scientist to come forward with this standpoint on universal creation.

For example, I can think of Einstein's famous "God does not play dice" quip in response to his disbelief of Max Born's work on quantum theory in 1926. If I were to take this literally, I'd assume Einstein thought God was immune to gambling problems. But no, Einstein didn't subscribe to the religious interpretation of God creating the universe -- he would often use a metaphorical "God" to communicate physics on the cutting edge.

Invoking God as an analogy to complex scientific theories seems to be all the rage. But Hawking points out that our theories about the Big Bang are becoming so complex, we don't need to imagine a supernatural being at all.

http://news.discovery.com/space/stephen-hawking-is-such-a-troublemaker.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1