Hawking on God again - "The Grand Design"

I woke up this morning to the news that, according to Stephen Hawking, God did not create the Universe but it was instead an “inevitable consequence of the Law of Physics”. By sheer coincidence this daft pronouncement has come out at the same time as the publication of Professor Hawking’s new book, an extract of which appears in todays Times.

Before I express my viewpoints, I'd like to establish that I do not believe in God, and yes, that means i'm an atheist. Therefore, my remarks might seem biased, but that's what keeps the debate on religion vs science going. I'm sure I will have several more posts on this topic in the future.

Stephen Hawking is undoubtedly a very brilliant theoretical physicist, though I wouldn't rank him in my top 20 all time physicists. However, something I’ve noticed about theoretical physicists over the years is that if you get them talking on subjects outside physics they are generally likely to say things just as daft as some drunk bloke down the pub. I’m afraid this is a case in point. And it's quite saddening to think that numerous fans follow every one of his remarks - no matter how religulous they may be.

God and physics are in my view pretty much orthogonal. To put it another way, if I were religious, there’s nothing in theoretical physics that would change make me want to change my mind. However, I’ll leave it to those many physicists who are learned in matters of theology to take up the (metaphorical) cudgels with Professor Hawking.

Though I haven't read the book yet, i'm sure it will be the usual nonsense some people put just to get media attention for a while to fund their studies. No offense to Professor Hawking, whom I respect very much.

Everything is Emergent ... Really?

It’s funny how when one thing is going good, it’s going great. And no one portrays that better than Erik Verlinde, who has made a claim that the reason why physicists do not understand the fundamentals of gravity is due to the fact that gravity is an emergent phenomenon, or an “entropic force”. As usual, the media gets all hyped, and so his claim ends up in the New York Times.

Now, if there is one model in physics that I am truly not very fond of, it would be the Standard Model. However, Verlinde has took his claim one step further with the help of Peter Freund, to claim that the Standard Model is also an emergent phenomenon. In fact, Freund has a new paper out on the arXiv entitled “Emergent Gauge Fields” with the following abstract:

Erik Verlinde’s proposal of the emergence of the gravitational force as an entropic force is extended to abelian and non-abelian gauge fields and to matter fields. This suggests a picture with no fundamental forces or forms of matter whatsoever.

And the appreciation:

I wish to thank Erik Verlinde for very helpful correspondence from which it is clear that he independently has also arrived at the conclusion that not only gravity, but all gauge fields should be emergent.

Geoffrey Chew's failed "bootstrap program" of the sixties - much the same reminiscing theoretical idea:

It is as if assuming certain forces and forms of matter to be fundamental is tantamount (in the sense of an effective theory) to assuming that there are no fundamental forces or forms of matter whatsoever, and everything is emergent. This latter picture in which nothing is fundamental is reminiscent of Chew’s bootstrap approach, the original breeding ground of string theory. Could it be that after all its mathematically and physically exquisite developments, string theory has returned to its birthplace?

It is still puzzling to me as to why this is a good thing. During David Gross' (a former student of Chew's) Nobel prize lecture, he explains:

I can remember the precise moment at which I was disillusioned with the bootstrap program. This was at the 1966 Rochester meeting, held at Berkeley. Francis Low, in the session following his talk, remarked that the bootstrap was less of a theory than a tautology…