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« Stephen Hawking, still fascinating | Main | 9/11, Mineta, and the conspiracists » Friday, April 13, 2007More Stephen HawkingReader J.H.M. writes in to alert me that there is a book that presents a key criticism to Hawking's "top-down" or "backwards" approach to cosmology. (Hawking uses both terms.) I'm not anywhere near qualified to say who's right, but in an intriguing book by Palle Yourgrau, "A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel And Einstein," he argues that Mr. Hawking has done some convoluted theorizing in an attempt to prove that our universe is not a so-called "Gödel Universe," which would imply that one could theoretically travel a path which would return you to the same place you started, only before you left. The book has much more on the philosophical background to turn of the century physics, and is fairly short. For those willing to hack their way through the argument J.H.M. is referring to, there's this, which provides the following quote from Yourgrau's book: Just as David Hilbert tried at first to avoid the consequences of the incompleteness theorem by inventing a new rule of logical inference out of whole cloth, so too the relativistic establishment, in the person of Stephen Hawking, tried to get around the embarrassing consequences introduced by the Gödel universe. If the annoying Gödel universe was consistent with the laws of general relativity, why not change the laws? Hawking thus introduced what he called the “chronology protection conjecture” (though a better name would have been the “anti-Gödel amendment”), which proposed a modification of general relativity whose primary goal was to rule out the possibility of world models like Gödel’s, with their awkward chronologies premitting closed temporal loops and causal chains with no beginning. Despite having, as Russell noted in a different context, all the advantages of theft over honest toil, Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture has won few adherents, its ad hoc character betraying itself. Does Stephen want to comment? Dare to dream. Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:42 AM
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