Stephen Hawking's successor named

Cambridge University has named the man who will succeed Professor Stephen Hawking in one of the world's most prestigious academic positions.

The celebrated physicist, who has motor neurone disease, completed his last day as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics on 30 September.

The university said Professor Michael Green had been elected as the 18th person to take up the position....

...The Lucasian Professorship was established in 1663 and previous holders have included Isaac Newton.

Here are some passages from A Brief History of Time. This book is full of spirituality.

From chapter 4, The Uncertainty Principle:

The doctrine of scientific determinism was strongly resisted by many people, who felt that it infringed God's freedom to intervene in the world, but it remained the standard assumption of science until the early years of this century...
The quantum hypothesis explained the observed rate of emission of radiation from hot bodies very well, but its implications for determinism were not realized until 1926, when another German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, formulated his famous uncertainty principle. In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, one has to be able to measure its present position and velocity accurately...
...In other words, the more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurate you can measure its speed, and vice versa...
The uncertainty principle had profound implications for the way in which we view the world. Even after more than fifty years they have not been fully appreciated by many philosophers, and are still the subject of much controversy. The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict the future state of the universe precisely! We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determine events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it.

From chapter 8, The Origin and Fate of the Universe

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits of the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe ti evolve according to them and dies not now intervene in it. But how did he choose the initial state or configuration of the universe? What were the "boundary conditions" at the beginning of time?
One possible answer is to say that God chose the initial configuration of the universe for reasons that we cannot hope to understand. This would certainly been within the power of an omnipotent being, but if he had started it off in such an incomprehensible way, why did he choose to let it evolve according to laws that we could understand? The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
...This means that the initial state of the universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed if the hot big bang model was correct right back to the beginning of time. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.
...If Euclidean space-time stretches back to infinite imaginary time, or else starts at a singularity in imaginary time, we have the same problem as in the classical theory of specifying the initial state of the universe: God may know how the universe began, but we cannot give any particular reason for thinking it began one way rather than another. On the one hand, the quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of the space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: "The boundary condition of the universe is that is has no boundary." The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.
...The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started -- it would still be up to God ti wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

From chapter 10, The Unification of Physics

But can there really be a unified theory? Or are we perhaps chasing a mirage? There seems to be three possibilities: 1) There really is is a complete unified theory, which we will someday discover if we are smart enough. 2) There is no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe more and more accurately. 3) There is no theory of the universe; events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner.
Some would argue for the third possibility on the grounds that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe on God's freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world. It's a bit like the old paradox: Can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it? But the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time: time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, he knew what he intended when he set it up!
With the advent of quantum mechanics, we have come to recognized that events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy but that there is always a degree of uncertainty. If one likes, one could ascribe this randomness to the intervention of God, but it would be a very strange kind of intervention: there is no evidence that it is directed toward any purpose. Indeed, if it were, it would by definition not be random. In modern times, we have removed the third possibility above by redefining the goal of science: our aim is to formulate a set of laws that enables us to predict events only up to the limit set by the uncertainty principle.

From chapter 11, Conclusion:

We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
...The success of these laws led Laplace at the beginning of the nineteenth century to postulate scientific determinism, that is, he suggested that there would be a set of laws that would determine the evolution of the universe precisely, given the configuration at one time.
Laplace's determinism was incomplete in two ways. It did not say how the laws should be chosen, and it did not specify the initial configuration of the universe. These were left to God. God would choose how the universe began and what laws it obeyed, but he would not intervene in the universe once it had been started. In effect, God was confined to the areas that nineteenth-century science did not understand.
...In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle. The question remains, however: How or why were the laws and the initial state of the universe chosen?
...These singularities would be an end of time for anyone who fell into the black hole. At the Big Bang and other singularities, all laws would have broken down, so God would still have had complete freedom to choose what happened and how the universe began.
...But if the universe is completely self-contained, with no singularities or boundaries, and completely described by a unified theory, that has profound implications for the role of God as Creator.
Einstein once asked the question: "How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?" If the no boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions. He would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories... that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of God.
...Up to now, most scientists have been too preoccupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why? On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advancement of scientific theories.
...However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we would know the mind of God.

-PJ

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