By Michael F. Duggan
Given that Professor Hawking was an epistemological realist, it is appropriate to remember him here.
If he had been a character out of fiction, you wouldn’t have believed it: a man stricken with ALS at the start of a brilliant career, one of the greatest minds of his or any generation, wheelchair bound, like the benevolent incarnation of a Bond super villain who had taken up the biggest challenge—the search for a Theory of Everything (TOE)—where Einstein had left off. An almost disembodied genius with a placid, computer-generated voice both electronic and mellifluous and as recognizable as any voice in the world (and far more familiar than his actual voice, 30 years gone). He was a cutting-edge theoretical physicist and cosmologist who, as much as anybody, breathed new life into General Relativity, who wrote books for a general audience, a scientist who had mixed feelings about science fiction, a genius who did not read until he was eight. There aren’t many people in this dangerous period that I would call a hero of mine, but Stephen Hawking was one of them.
A triumph of the human will, he survived motor neuron disease, superhero-like for 55 years (most people last about 14 months and it killed Lou Gehrig and Tony Judt in 2 or 3 yeas. Hawking was the longest known survivor of ALS). He wrote numerous books and papers by twitching a small functioning muscle near his eye, a sole remaining interactive link between his inner cosmos and the external world. He had a killer (and apparently infuriating) sense of humor and appeared on “The Simpsons” at least twice (Homer: “Larry Flynt is right!”).
There were and are physicists as brilliant as he (Bohr, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Penrose, Weinberg, Wheeler, Witten), and a few thinkers who were even greater (Einstein, Kant, Leibniz, Maxwell, Newton). There were scientists who formulated more radical theories than Hawking (Julian Barbour/the “timeless universe”, Hugh Everett III/multiverse, Gerald ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind/the holographic principle), and some may be identified more closely with specific ideas (Witten and M-theory, Alan Guth and Andre Linde and inflation, perhaps Gell-Mann and quarks). And certainly there are cosmologists with whom one might agree more (for me, Lee Smolin and his ideas of cosmological natural selection and the primacy of time). But there was something uniquely appealing about Stephen Hawking. Even in a Golden Age of cosmological speculation—a new Pre-Socratic Era that he helped usher-in—his star shone especially bright.
He was not afraid to risk being wrong—thus embodying the kind of courage at the heart of science when done well—and he famously lost bets to Leonard Susskind (“is the information in a decaying black hole lost?”), John Preskill, and Kip Thorne. And of course his many triumphs would not have been possible without others (Dennis Sciama, Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, and Jane Hawking, among the many).
When I was studying at a school associated with Hawking, the College of Gonville and Caius at Cambridge (in a summer semester program in 1992), a friend came in a rush to get me in the library. “Professor Hawking is downstairs!” she said, out of breath. I almost tripped over my feet running down the ancient spiral stairway and out to the street only to see a specially-equipped van pulling away. I also remember how the impressive painting of him stood out as a super-terrestrial omnipresence among the other luminaries of the college in the great medieval dinning hall (even the portrait of John Venn looked a little intimidated).
In the 1980s Hawking grew frustrated that a TOE was not forthcoming, and he lapsed from a perspective of Popperian critical rationalism and a cosmological outlook of sophisticated realism to something like instrumentalism, and then to his mature view that he called “model dependent realism.” I think that his famous 2011 statement that “philosophy is dead” is dead wrong (cosmology is as much speculative philosophy as it is an extension of theoretical physics, and our understanding of the relationship of the physical world with the realms of consciousness and ideas is still in its infancy). He also embraced a hard, deterministic physicalism that I believe goes too far in not acknowledging ideas and consciousness as ontological categories. I would contend that the very reality of his expansive but increasingly isolated consciousness and the complex ideas he interacted with and formulated (to say nothing of the fact that the physical universe seems to operate on mathematical principles) tend to corroborate my position while calling his own monism into question. But then who am I relative to Stephen Hawking?
Perhaps it is all just human conceit to think that the physical universe(s) can be integrated, reduced, to an elegant, unified sets of fundamental laws, or even a single set of laws that Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and Hawking had hoped for. Perhaps, as Lee Smolin and Max Tegmark (among others) have suggested, there are any number of sets of fundamental laws and that these may be mutually exclusive outside of their respective realms or when used in conjunction with other sets of laws. Still, the various efforts at devising this biggest of ideas—a Theory of Everything—must be regarded as one of the monumental and audacious efforts of our species, even if all such efforts ultimately fail. If a unified field theory is someday discovered, “it will be the ultimate triumph of human reason…”
Hawking was one of those rare people who you simply took to be a part of the intellectual and commentary backdrop of the times, and it was easy to take him for granted. Unbelievably, he survived with one of the most dreaded of dread diseases for my entire lifetime to date—he was diagnosed the year I was born—and every few months (most recently in February or early March), I found myself asking “how is this man still alive?” Although it is difficult to believe that he lived as long as he did, it is even more difficult to believe that he is really gone.
He was a commentator above the fray, an oracle of reason and intellect of the front rank whose occasional public warnings about what we are doing to the planet held the attention of the rational in an increasingly irrational time. He warned of the advanced state of the human-caused destruction of the environment and by extension, ourselves, and disabused people of heady technological solutions like leaving the Earth to colonize other planets in the foreseeable future. Gone. It feels as if a responsible adult has left alone the atavistic boys of The Lord of the Flies to their island after telling them to behave in his absence.
If the Block Universe is a true model, he will live forever within brackets set in 1942 and 2018. If ideas exist as eternal entities, he will live forever with them. If not, he may only live as long as the historical memory of our species. One is tempted to be dramatic and put this life into Hamlet-like terms, that “He was a man, taken for all…” and yet he was more. For those of us who remain confined in the “stubbornly persistent illusion” of the present moment, I am confident that we shall not see his like again.