A high point of my career, and faith in science, was a cosmology workshop I bulled my way into in 1990. Thirty leading physicists, including Stephen Hawking, gathered in a rustic resort in northern Sweden to swap ideas about how our universe was born.
One afternoon, the workshop participants traveled to a local church to hear a concert. As they marched down the center aisle of the packed church, led by Hawking in his wheelchair, the parishioners stood and applauded. The symbolism thrilled me. These churchgoers seemed to acknowledge that science was displacing religion as the source of answers to the deepest mysteries, like why we exist.
That scene came to mind as I read Hawking’s new bestseller Brief Answers to the Big Questions. Reading the book was a bittersweet experience, and not only because Hawking died last March at the age of 76. (His book was completed by colleagues and family members.) Brief Answers resembles a relic from a long-gone golden age of science, when the high priests of science were at the peak of their power.
Hawking personified the hubris of science in the late 20th century. In a 1980 lecture, “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?”, he expressed “cautious optimism” that within 20 years physicists would discover a “complete theory” that would solve the riddle of existence. It would tell us what reality is made of, where it came from and why it takes the form we observe. He expanded on these ideas in Brief History of Time, published in 1988.
In his new book, Hawking pushes back his prediction for a final theory of physics to the end of this century, but otherwise his ideas haven’t changed much. String theory remains his favorite theory of everything. It conjectures that reality is made of infinitesimal strings, loops, or membranes wriggling in a hyperspace of 10 dimensions. The theory also suggests that our cosmos might be a minuscule bubble in an infinite “multiverse.”
Our scientific picture of the cosmos, Hawking proposes, is already so complete that it eliminates the need for God. “No one created the universe,” he declares, “and no one directs our fate.” We don’t need God to save us either, Hawking suggests. If the Earth becomes unlivable, whether because of nuclear war, runaway global warming, pandemics, or an asteroid collision, science can help us escape to Mars and elsewhere. Our future, Hawking states, “lies in going boldly where no one else has gone before.”
Hawking recognizes science’s declining status. He deplores widespread doubts about global warming, nuclear power, vaccines, genetically-modified foods, and evolution. He calls for better science education to lure more young people into science and to counter public ignorance. “The low esteem in which science and scientists are held is having serious consequences,” Hawking complains.
He fails to mention that science’s wounds are at least partially self-inflicted. Studies have recently shown that many and even most findings published in peer-reviewed journals cannot be replicated by follow-up research. The so-called replication crisis is especially severe in fields with high financial stakes, such as oncology and psychopharmacology.
But physics, which should serve as the bedrock of science, is in some respects the most troubled field of all. Over the last few decades, physics in the grand mode practiced by Hawking has become increasingly disconnected from empirical evidence. Proponents of string and multiverse models tout their mathematical elegance, but strings are too small and multiverses too distant to be detected by any plausible experiment.
In her new book Lost in Math, German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who recently spoke here at Stevens, offers a far more candid and compelling assessment of modern physics than Hawking. She fears that physicists working on strings and multiverses are not really practicing physics. “I’m not sure anymore that what we do here, in the foundations of physics, is science,” she confesses.
As I finished Brief Answers, a question came to mind. Will science ever regain its luster? Will it earn back the public’s trust in a new golden age, or will its credibility be permanently diminished? I’m not sure which scenario I prefer. I’m glad I witnessed science’s high priests at the height of their glory. But perhaps we are better off doubting all authorities, including scientific ones.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This review is adapted from one originally published in The Wall Street Journal.
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