Hawking's Words About God

According to reviewers, Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking claims in an about-to-be-published book "The Grand Design" that The Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe.

Hawking is an influential guy, and he should be careful about what he says.

Hawking has erred before, in the same arena. The problem wasn't quite as simple as this, but it came down to this: Hawking Radiation, which has never been detected per se, was said by Hawking to be emitted by all black holes, causing them all, ultimately, to evaporate.

In other words, no black hole is truly black.

The problem with saying that is that relative to us, NO BLACK HOLE HAS EVER COMPLETED FORMING. This is called "relativistic time dilation." In a sense, there CAN'T BE such a thing as a "black hole," because black holes, relative to distant observers, never reach "black-hole-ness."

The reason why this happens is that as things get heavier, gravity from them gets stronger. As the gravity gets stronger, the forward progression of time within that gravitational field slows down relative to the time of observers not so close to the gravitational source. As the gravitational field of the heavy object approaches the theoretical weight of an object with gravity so strong that one must travel the speed of light to escape, time begins to become infinitely slow.

Result: The stuff making-up the star forming a black hole never quite succeeds in forming a black hole relative to people far away -- us.

Black holes thus can not, in a philosophical sense, "begin to evaporate," because the black holes themselves relative to us never finish forming. Ever.

What black holes do, instead, is approach "black-hole-ness" the same way a child, during recess, approaches the wall of the school by always stepping half of the remaining distance toward the wall of the school, never ever quite reaching it. She will be there for the next 20,000 centuries and beyond, trying uselessly to solve the problem of reaching the school wall while she follows the rule. In mathematics, we would say that the wall as become an "asymptope" -- something always approached but never reached.

Another way-y to-o-o-o understand-d-d-d-d-d-d-d what-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t is-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s happening-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g is-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s ... and so on, ad infinitum. The sentence is infinitely long.

If, relative to us, a black hole never finishes becoming a black hole, the black-hole-in-formation -- what I call an "incipient black hole," or "IBH," can never evaporate.

Yet, Hawking's Hawking Radiation is talked about, and analyzed, as though black holes finish forming relative to us.

They don't.

One might respond, "But there are TWO realities, Mr. Dawson -- one AT the black hole, one away from it."

Are there? The problem with the dual reality claim is that the speaker of the sentence -- like Mr. Hawking himself -- is out here.

And he can PRETEND to himself that his mind can bridge the time dilation gap.

But can it, really? Can it, really? Philosophically, IS there a useful place to go?

Interestingly, as I discussed at the beginning of the blog, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are apparently LOOKING FOR evaporating mini-black-holes -- as though one could finish form relative to observers and then -- phhhhhhtttttt! -- wink out of existence.

The best they are liable to come up with, I am afraid, is a non-evaporating persistently-existing mini-IBH -- a nearly invisible little monster which eats its way through the walls of the collider with extraordinary explosive violence, and then eats its way to the center of the Earth, where gravity will force-feed the Earth's rock to it, until we are gone.

If Mother Earth is collapsing all around him and he is about to be sucked-into an Earth-eating IBH created by the Collider, I wonder if Hawking will pray to God, or to Gravity?