The More You Know the Less You Know

by Madeleine Kando

We often hear the term ‘the haves and the have-nots’ used in the context of economic welfare. It is less common to hear the term applied to ‘knowledge’. One area of knowledge where the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots is extremely wide is physics. I belong to the group of the have-nots.

It is not for want of trying. I have many books on ‘popular’ physics on my book shelf.

The most recent acquisition is a book called ‘The Grand Design’, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. The thing I like the most about the book is that it doesn’t contain one single mathematical equation.

In this book the authors ask three basic questions:

1) why is there something instead of nothing?
2) why do we exist?
3) why does this particular set of laws govern our universe and not some other set?

They answer the first question ‘why is there something instead of nothing’, by saying that it is possible that something comes into existence out of nothing because of quantum fluctuations.

I think a quantum fluctuation is when a particle and an anti-particle find each other and then immediately knock each other out of existence. Except, once in a while, there is no time for that process and poof, something appears instead of gets annihilated. So there you go, a new something. And because of the inflation theory, it grows into an entire universe.

It sounds pretty weird to me, but who am I to argue? The thing I find almost more puzzling than this revelation (that the universe has created itself), is the reaction to this new hypothesis.

Although Hawking’s book contains many incredibly important and fascinating chapters, 99% of the reviews of the book focus on this one particular statement. It is as if the world at large can not accept the possibility that the universe has no creator. The God debate overshadows everything related to this new masterpiece and it is easy to get sucked into it. I, for one, am totally happy with the notion that the universe created itself. It sounds a lot simpler than trying to prove the existence of a creator.

He also says that philosophy is dead, that it has been replaced by science. That I find hard to swallow. It means that only physicists are able to understand the world. Philosophers and the rest of us, whose nature it is to speculate, philosophize, ask ‘what if’ questions, we are all doomed to stupidity and ignorance.

We don’t need a God, we don’t need philosophy… all we need is gravity, according to Hawking. ‘Given the existence of gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason why the universe and humanity exist.'

‘Why DO we exist?’ Well, we just happen to live in one of an infinite number of universes where the laws of the cosmos allow the appearance of life. Not only that, but we also happen to live in the Goldilocks zone of OUR universe, a small band where the conditions are ‘just right’, so that life can develop.

There is also the possibility, according to John Gribbin, that our universe was created in a particle accelerator by a more advanced civilization in another universe. Universes are not hard to jump-start, he says, since the required mass-energy is equal to zero. So we might just be the result of an extraterrestrial’s high-school science project.

The bottom line is that no-one knows the answer to these questions. Still, we have progressed. When people thought the world was flat the question of the day was: ‘what is at the edge of the flat world?’ Then it was discovered that the world was round, so the question became irrelevant.

Now we ask the question: what was before the Big Bang? What if there was no ‘before’? Hawking says that you can compare the history of the universe to a ball, like the earth. If you go down from the equator, back in time, towards the south pole, you eventually reach a point. That’s the Big Bang. The question ‘what is south of the south pole’ becomes meaningless: there is nothing south of the south pole. leave comment here