HAWKING HAS NOT CRACKED THE HUMAN MYSTERY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

Hawking has not cracked the human mystery

By Michael Skapinker

Published: September 13 2010 22:23

Most commentary on Stephen Hawking’s new book The Grand Design has dwelt on his dismissal of God. This was big news because Professor Hawking had previously seemed open to the deity idea. In A Brief History of Time, his earlier work, he wrote that when we understood why we and the universe existed we would “know the mind of God”.

Like many who embarked on A Brief History of Time, I never fathomed Prof Hawking’s mind, let alone God’s, and gave up less than half-way through. The Grand Design proved more satisfactory. There were occasions when Prof Hawking (along with Leonard Mlodinow, his co-writer) lost me, but he happily scooped me up a page or two later and swept me through to the end of his exuberant, exhilarating journey.

I put the book down, slightly dazed, but pretty sure that God’s followers will not be bothered by it. The literalists – those who believe that Noah had baby dinosaurs on board – will simply ignore it. Those of the faithful who happily accommodate science’s insights will retort that while Prof Hawking may have discovered how the universe came to be, he is still no clearer on what its purpose is.

But while Prof Hawking’s God-denial may have won the headlines, the book’s thrill, to me, comes from the clarity with which he explains previous scientific advances and the boldness with which he outlines newer ones.

Central to Prof Hawking’s book is M-theory, which is not a single proposition but a family of theories, each to describe a different situation. He begins with the objects of our everyday lives, moves on to the parts of those objects that are too small for us to see, then to our own and other planetary systems and finally to the universe (or universes – Hawking argues that ours is one of many).

While his explanation of quantum theory did not quite get me there (even Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics”), it got me closer than I have come before. I even acquired a glimmer of how we might understand the idea that time began with the Big Bang.

Not everything Prof Hawking says is wholly convincing to my mind, but The Grand Design provides sufficient promise that one day even we non-scientists might understand the way the universe, or universes, work. Just one thing might remain beyond our understanding: us.

Prof Hawking argues that the human brain is as governed by the laws of physics and chemistry as anything else. Studies of patients undergoing brain surgery while awake show that by stimulating the appropriate part of the brain, you can create the desire to move a hand or foot, or talk. “It seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion,” he writes.

Does that mean he can work out what we are about to do, or what we think? No, but that is only because there are too many variables to make it practical. “For that, one would need a knowledge of the initial state of each of the thousand trillion trillion molecules in the human body and to solve something like that number of equations. That would take a few billion years.”

Instead, Prof Hawking says, we have developed theories that provide adequate explanations of how people behave, such as psychology – or economics. How well does economics describe our behaviour? Not very well. In its classical form, it assumes a level of rational calculation that we often fail to exhibit. The same applies to business, or public policy. People are maddeningly inconsistent. Some trade off current pleasure for future security or health; others do not.

By Prof Hawking’s account, understanding human behaviour is merely a computational problem. If we could make those trillions of calculations, people would cease to be a puzzle. But would they? Could physics and chemistry alone explain why one person invests in risky mining ventures while another squirrels money away in low-interest accounts; why one person is terrified of flying while another races motorbikes? Why one person supports Arsenal, another Tottenham, and a third loathes football altogether? Why I chose to write this article and you to read this far? Whatever else we come to understand, I suspect we humans will remain one of the universe’s true mysteries.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.