Universe, Big Bang, Black Holes; Dialogue on Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time.

Betty: Frank, we are not scientists; we can’t answer difficult scientific questions. And time is too short to cover this big topic. That said, tell why we chose Stephen Hawking’s 2005 A Briefer History of Time.

Frank: Well, we need to know what scientists say about our Universe and our place in it. We all ask sometime: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Who made the Universe? Why? Where is God? We are shaped mainly by the traditional thinking, bias if you will, of family, class, income, school, church, the Bible, national culture, and not enough by scientific knowledge.

Betty: Good enough reasons. And, the scientific terms we use we try to make clear in context. Frank, let’s take a quick look at British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote this book with Chicago-born (1954-) physicist Leonard Mlodinow.

Frank: Stephen Hawking (born Jan. 8, 1942) is world famous Cambridge University Lucasian professor of mathematics, often compared to Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in knowing about the Universe. Hawking has a debilitating nerve disorder, Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, but has survived to age 65, wheelchair-bound for the last 44 years.

Betty: Stephen Hawking’s major research has been on Black Holes, part of the unseen dark matter comprising over 90% of all space, arising from the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time updates and simplifies his similarly titled 1988 book which was on the London Sunday Times best seller list for over four years.

Frank: Albert Einstein looked for but never found a "Unified Theory" to explain the Universe and our place in it. Hawking seeks the same thing in the Big Bang and Black Holes. Since the early 1900s scientists have gathered more and more evidence that our Universe was created in a Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago when an infinitely tiny atom expanded into our present infinitely large Universe. To find this Unified Theory, this holy grail, wrote Hawking at the end of A Briefer History of Time, may help us: "… know the mind of God."

Betty: Before being interviewed for the British newspaper Guardian, Sept. 27, 2005, Hawking returned the interviewer’s advance questions. He asked for shorter, more focused questions. The interviewer, facing him in his Cambridge University office, shocked by his disability, saw that Hawking's frailty was the reason for his request.

Frank: He sat shriveled, voiceless, immobile in a wheel chair, able to lift only one finger to his computer. He can twitch only one muscle on his right cheek, which is targeted by an infrared beam. This beam allows him to sift through a specially prepared dictionary, then send his thoughts through his computer to his voice synthesizer, slowly, painfully. Yet he is upbeat, impish, playful.

Betty: The interviewer asked: Does your 2005 book have enough material not found in your 1988 book for people to buy it? Hawking twitches his right cheek, his computer beeps, he answers over his voice synthesizer: My 1988 book aroused interest. Many found it difficult. I made the 2005 book easier and added new discoveries about the Universe.

Frank: Interviewer: Are you worried that readers will think you’re just cashing in on your new book?

Betty: Hawking: I put a lot of effort into this 2005 book when I was critically ill with pneumonia. Scientists need to explain their work, especially about the Universe, because it answers a lot of questions once asked about religion.

Frank: Despite round-the-clock nursing care, Hawking holds the same named Cambridge University professorship that Sir Isaac Newton held. Hawking tutors selected bright Ph.D. candidates who also help him. Using his computerized voice synthesizer he lectures at Cambridge, elsewhere, and overseas. He writes technical and popular books about the Universe. His website has the full text of his recent papers.1 1

Betty: His is a brilliant mind in an immobile body. More about Hawking later. Now, a brief historical background: early humans observed the regular movement of heavenly bodies; used these cycles to mark calendar days, months, seasons, years; to plant seeds, gather crops, and navigate boats.

Frank: Ancient Chinese, 1300s BC, charted the positions of the stars and recorded eclipses of the Sun. Babylonians, 700 BC, recorded planets closest to and farthest from the Sun. Ancient Egyptians aligned temples and pyramids with heavenly bodies. Stonehenge in southern England marked the positions of the Sun and the Moon.

Betty: Greek philosopher Pythagoras (580-500 BC) described planets revolving around the earth. Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) saw the earth as round, stationary, about which planets and stars revolved. This earth-centered system, perpetuated by Egyptian astronomer-geographer Claudius Ptolemy (100-170 AD), lasted to the 1500s C.E. The Catholic Church favored this earth-centered view because it left room for heaven and hell.

Frank: Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), by first proclaiming a heliocentric, sun-centered planetary system, founded modern astronomy. Because he held a Catholic Church office and wanted to avoid Church censorship, his book was not published until 1543, the year he died.

Betty: Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) described more precisely Copernicus’s sun-centered system. Tycho Brahe’s assistant, German Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), recorded that our Earth and neighboring planets circle the Sun in an oval, elliptical path. Little was then known of planets outside our own solar system.

Frank: Italian Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the first to use a telescope, copied from the Dutch, to observe the movement of planets. By confirming Copernicus’ sun-centered system, he ended the Ptolemian earth-centered system. The Catholic Church, refusing its approval, placed Galileo under house arrest, but he greatly advanced astronomy.

Betty: England’s Isaac Newton (1642-1727), greatest scientist of his time, gave us Calculus, essential in astronomical computation, and a new concept of light and color. He sent a beam of sunlight through a glass prism to show that white light consists of a rainbow of colors. These flow from hydrogen and helium burning inside our blazing Sun’s core.

Frank: Newton explained that gravity holds matter together; makes apples fall from trees, the Moon orbit the Earth, planets orbit the Sun, galaxies of suns whirl around each other. Newton gave us universal laws of motion; showed that force is needed to start and stop a moving object, or planet, or galaxy, or group of galaxies.

Betty: In 1905 the 26-year-old little known German-born Albert Einstein (1879-1955), working in the Bern, Switzerland, patent office, published several major scholarly papers. One paper showed how molecules and atoms work. Eighty years earlier (1827) Scottish biologist Robert Brown (b. 1773) saw under a microscope grains of pollen placed in water suddenly move about irregularly. Scientists since then wondered why.

Frank: Using a mathematical formula, Einstein explained this "Brownian movement" as magnetically charged atoms inside water molecules bombarding the pollen grains and moving them erratically. What molecules and atom do we know only by their magnetic effect on other nearby bits of matter.

Betty: Einstein showed that inside the atom are lighter electrons circling a heavier proton. Inside the proton are neutrons, inside neutrons, quarks, ad infinitum, tiny universes within universes, known by the effect of their magnetic charge. The effect is that unlike charges attract (plus+ and minus-); and like charges repel. Electro-magnetically charged atoms in water molecules made pollen grains in water move erratically.

Frank: Einstein thus affirmed atomic structure, advanced Quantum Physics, the subatomic magnetic workings of nature's tiniest building blocks which comprise the Universe and life on Earth.

Betty: Another 1905 Einstein paper was on light, first thought to be an electro-magnetic wave. Einstein said light was also independent particles of energy called "quanta." When light quanta strike some metals, those metals eject electrons. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1921) for this paper, the basis of automatic light-operated garage and other door openers, basis for electronic devices, TV, laser surgery, and PET scans.

Frank: Einstein’s most famous 1905 paper on Special Relativity (and his 1915 paper on General Relativity) said that matter and energy are not separate but related and interchangeable. Crack open its atoms and matter can be turned into energy, and vice versa, as in atomic and hydrogen bomb explosions.

Betty: Einstein’s Relativity papers also said: space and time are not separate but operate together as space-time. And, the gravitational pull of a large planet-like mass will bend both light and space around it. E=mc2: Energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared.

Frank: Einstein sent his 1915 General Relativity paper to University of Leyden (Netherlands) astronomy Prof. Willem de Sitter (1872-1935), who sent the paper on to the Royal Astronomical Society’s secretary, Cambridge University astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944).

Betty: Eddington wanted to photograph an eclipse of the Sun to test Einstein’s theory that light bends around a large mass. In 1915 England in World War I was blockaded by German U-Boats. Eddington waited, then organized photo expeditions to Brazil and Principe, an island off the West African coast, where the May 29, 1919, eclipse was clearest.

Frank: Scientists verified in photos of the eclipse that light indeed bent around the Sun, as Einstein predicted. The London Times, Nov. 7, 1919, headlined: "Revolution in Science. New Theory of the Universe. Newton’s Ideas Overthrown."1

Betty: Little known till then, Einstein was lionized by the press, became a public idol, was on Time magazine’s cover five times, the last on Dec. 31, 1999, as "Man of the Century."3

Frank: A leading U.S. physicist wrote of Einstein (2005) : "E=mc2 is the secret of the stars. It is the cosmic engine that drives the entire universe. It means that even a few tablespoons of matter, if fully burned, can release the energy of an atomic bomb. It’s the reason why the stars shine, and why the Sun lights up the Earth. Matter and energy are…the same thing, and can turn into each other. Even a rock can turn into a light ray if the rock happens to be uranium and the light ray is a burst of atomic radiation."4

Betty: From 1900 onwards scientists made rapid progress through larger telescopes on land and better ones orbiting in space above the Earth’s haze. They recorded, far beyond our solar system and our Milky Way galaxy, billions of galaxies in a seemingly endless Universe.

Frank: In 1913 U.S. astronomer V. M. Slipher (1875-1969), using the 30" telescope at Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, AZ, first recorded galaxies beyond our Milky Way moving rapidly away from Earth and away from each other. Slipher’s findings were the first inkling of the later named Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe.

Betty: In the early 1920s Russian mathematician Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann (1888-1925), reasoning from Einstein’s 1905 and 1915 relativity theories, perceptively envisioned scenarios about the origin of the Universe. Caught up in the Russian Revolution and dying young at 37, Friedmann’s views were then little noticed.

Frank: In Friedmann’s first scenario the Universe steadily expanded, continually adding stars and galaxies newly created from ancient swirling gaseous debris, the Steady State theory.

Betty: Friedmann’s insightful second scenario anticipated the Big Bang: if galaxies are expanding, then something made them expand. Like a film run backward, they must earlier have been closer, ever closer, squeezed together, as small as a ball, as tiny as an atom.

Frank: Friedmann conjectured that the Universe expanded from a tiny dot of matter, a singularity, from some charge inside an atom. That tiny dot in the atom was so intensely small, dense, heavy, hot that it exploded and expanded.

Betty: From Einstein’s E=mc2 Friedmann envisioned incredibly hot gases from massive Big Bang expansion giving birth to other hot atoms. These atoms, when cooled, formed hydrogen and helium. These, when further cooled, were clumped together by gravity to form hydrogen-burning stars, then galaxies which, after many changes over billions of years, became our present Universe.

Frank: In 1927 what Friedmann theorized, Belgian Catholic priest Georges Henri Lemaítre (1894-1966), who studied astro-physics in the U.S., first publicly proclaimed: that the Universe was most likely born long ago in a singularity, an instant of time, a Big Bang. The name, "Big Bang," was coined originally as a term of derision by steady-state enthusiast British astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001).

Betty: In 1929 Missouri-born Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953), athlete, Rhodes Scholar, lawyer-turned astronomer, continued V. M. Slipher’s 1913 observation of galaxies beyond our Milky Way.

Frank: Using the 100" telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, CA, Hubble calibrated the speed of nine galaxies beyond our Milky Way as they moved away from earth and from each other. Hubble’s Law (1929) stated that galaxies move apart at a rate that increases with their distance from the earth.5

Betty: Next, Russian-born astronomer George Gamow (1904-68), Alexander Friedmann’s student, later did space research at George Washington University, Washington, DC.

Frank: Gamow’s 1948 paper with colleagues offered telescopic and mathematical proof that far off galaxies were moving rapidly away from the earth and each other; that they expanded originally from a packed, dense, heavy, hot singularity.

Betty: From this pinpoint spewed forth blazing rays and gases which, as they cooled over time, became the atoms, matter, planets, and galaxies of our present Universe.

Frank: Further evidence of the Big Bang came by accident in 1965. Radio astronomers Arno Penzias (1933-) and Robert W. Wilson (1936-), working at Bell Laboratory, NJ, measuring radio waves, heard puzzling low steady static in their large horn-like receiving antennas.

Betty: They heard the same static day and night from all points of the sky beyond our Milky Way galaxy. What is this strange static from outer space, they asked colleagues? A friend told Penzias that two physicists at nearby Princeton, NJ, were searching for the radiation George Gamow predicted still existed from the Big Bang.

Frank: Penzias and Wilson realized that they had stumbled on the cosmic microwave background of the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. They won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.

Betty: More Big Bang confirmation came in 1992 when NASA’s (National and Aeronautical Space Administration’s) orbital telescope called COBE (that is, Cosmic Background Explorer), took pictures of Big Bang remnants. In Sept. 2006 COBE’s leading scientists, John Mather (b. 1946) and George F. Smoot (b. 1945), won the Nobel Prize in Physics for documenting further Big Bang evidence.6

Frank: In 1965, when Penzias and Wilson found the Big Bang hiss, Stephen Hawking at 23 was a Cambridge University graduate student looking for a Ph.D. dissertation topic. He had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, Jan. 1962, given 2 years to live, was despondent, but encouraged to persevere by Jane Wilde, his future wife, an Oxford graduate student whom he had met at a party. They married in July 1965.

Betty: Encouraged by Jane Wilde and his Cambridge doctoral advisor, Hawking felt reasonably well, wanted to marry, needed a job, knew that to get a university teaching job he needed a Ph.D., and to finish his Ph.D. he needed a dissertation topic.

Frank: Hawking’s dissertation topic idea on Black Holes came from a 1965 paper by Oxford professor of mathematics Roger Penrose (b. 1931-).

Betty: Penrose, a member of Hawking’s Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation committee, showed, mathematically, that Black Holes first erupted with other debris during the Big Bang.

Frank: Penrose also showed that, since the Big Bang, when large stars burned all their hydrogen, collapsed, were crushed into a singularity, a point of infinite density, they became invisible Black Holes, sucking in with incredible force everything around them: dust, meteorites, planets, galaxies; acting like powerful vacuum cleaners.

Betty: Nothing escapes a Black Hole, not even light, it was thought, until Hawking in 1973 showed mathematically that Black Holes do emit absorbed material in garbled form. This emission is called "Hawking Radiation." In papers with Penrose and other scholars Hawking showed mathematically that Black Holes erupted from the Big Bang as part of the unseen dark matter of the Universe, that Black Holes are still being created from large burned-out stars, that by redirecting matter back into the Universe they may give it balance and purpose.

Frank: Wife Jane Wilde helped Hawking survive loss of neuromuscular control, get his Ph.D. degree, secure academic appointment, and rise to the top of his field as lecturer, author, and Black Hole explorer.

Betty: Jane Hawking’s memoir, Music to Move the Stars, 1999, told of their 3 children and 2 grandchildren. She wrote: when Stephen was in a wheelchair and could not dress himself, we had little outside help except from a few of his physics students in exchange for extra tutoring. Needing money, I encouraged him to write his popular A Brief History of Time, 1988. The book’s success led to a film about the book. Later a book was published about the film.

Frank: Their drift apart came with the success of his popular books, his rising fame, and his pop-star status. Of their breakup she wrote: "Many factors—fame, fortune, diverging aspirations, priorities and outlook, as well as many people—[came] between [us]… I was cast aside in favour of someone who seemed to offer more constant and devoted nursing care and travel companionship…."7

Betty: Jane, a devout Christian, disliked Stephen’s agnosticism. They separated in 1991, divorced, both remarried, Stephen Hawking to one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, 1995. This second marriage also ended in divorce after 11 years in 2006. 8

Frank: Hawking is ambivalent about God in his books and speeches. He says that he is not an atheist, calls himself an agnostic, and like Einstein sees God in the orderliness of nature. Here are some Hawking quotations.

Betty: On God: To Einstein’s statement: "that God does not play dice," Hawking retorted, "God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen." 9

Frank: On "divine inspiration:" "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."

Betty: On wars, viruses, floods, asteroids, other catastrophes: "I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space."

Frank: On his goal: "My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the Universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."

Betty: On humanity’s special place: "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."

Frank: On human destructiveness: "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image."

Betty: On his disability: "It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven’t done so badly. People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining."

Frank: Scientists say that the Big Bang wiped out everything before it, so that what existed before is unknowable. The Big Bang created space, time, gravity and the hot soupy gas from which, when cooled, came hydrogen, helium, atoms, stars, galaxies, and unseen dark matter including Black Holes.

Betty: When stars burn all their hydrogen, they collapse, die, and gravity adds their debris to other stars or galaxies. Thrown off from the galaxy we call our Milky way, one of its secondary or third generation stars, 4.5 billion years ago, became our Sun. From our Sun's blazing off-shoots came 8 planets including Earth, held in orbit by gravity.

Frank: Earth, third planet from the Sun, is shielded from most of the Sun’s deadly rays by Mercury and Venus. Earth's unique position protects life from most catastrophic meteorite hits; it also shields humans from the killing frost of planets beyond it: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (Pluto was reduced from planet status in 2006). Earth, so far, and perhaps Mars, has water, oxygen, and other elements needed for life.

Betty: Earth’s position from the Sun, size, gravitational spin for a 24 hour night and day, seasonal changes, temperate climate, ozone layer, having water, having needed minerals, other beneficial factors—all make it ideal for living things, including humans.

Frank: Earth alone, so far, has conditions and chemicals needed for human life. We humans are composed of water (H2O), 75%; carbon, 12.5%; oxygen, 6.25%; nitrogen 2.5%; calcium, iron, other elements, 3.75%.9

Betty: Our Sun has lived half its life span. It will burn all its hydrogen some 4.5 billion years from now, grow cold, collapse, die. Its planets and moons will die before it. Our solar debris will be recycled into other stars of our galaxy. The cycle is birth, growth, aging, death, rebirth.

Frank: So far we humans on Earth are unique in the Universe, made of Big Bang star dust to which we will return.

Betty: Frank, we need quick views on: 1-the book's value to young and old, 2-religion and the Big Bang, 3-our evaluation of Hawking, and 4-final thoughts.

Frank: Hawking's A Briefer History of Time is worth reading. It's a beginning, an eye opener; it makes you want to read more for deeper understanding. Young people who will shape our future will profit most. Pondering this book is a maturing experience.

Betty: Genesis and the Big Bang have a lot in common if you lengthen a Biblical day to mean a long, long time. Religion and science are not in conflict if the Creator, not chance, is seen as the author of the Big Bang.

Frank: "There are no atheists in fox holes" as was said in World War II. We all cry out sometime, "O God! O God!" Most U.S. adults say they believe in a Supreme Being; about half of U.S. adults, including scientists, attend church. Atheism and agnosticism are not mainstream. The human search for meaning is universal. 10

Betty: Scientific knowledge offsets U.S. religious extremists attempt to impose a theocracy. Recall colonial Puritan extremists in Salem, Mass. who burned witches. Today's Intelligent Design advocates are disguised Creation Science absolutists of the 1970's. Scientific awareness and separation of church and state are bulwarks against theocratic dictates. Beware the Pat Robertsons of the Christian Coalition and the 700 Club.; beware the Jerry Falwells of the Moral Majority and Liberty University.

Frank: Hawking attracts sympathy for his handicap and admiration for his scientific contributions. His A Briefer history of Time is a thought-provoking eye-opener. He enlarges our vision of the Universe and humanity, shows us our place in an unfolding Universe, stimulates scholars and lay people to think, makes us forward looking.

Betty: Hawking is smart; even brilliant, but not up to Einstein's stature. Hawking has won most prestigious prizes but not the Nobel Prize whose judges require verification of an important theory. Black Holes and their function have yet to be verified. Hawking exemplifies our need to find and educate bright youngsters to advance science.

Frank: I echoes your point on educational improvement. Nature's DNA enables most plants and animals to survive almost instinctively from birth. We humans are born helpless. We need parental, adult care to survive. Unlike a perfect ant or a perfect bee, human beings at birth lack survival skills. These skills, given through adolescence by family, society, and schools, need to be lengthened and strengthened. We need to continually humanize ourselves through altruism and concern for others. We advance as we clean up our Earth, air, and uplift fellow humans everywhere.

Betty: I am reminded of Eric Hoffer (1902-83), whose 1950s-70s books were much admired. Hoffer wrote in Ordeal of Change, 1963, that the "only legitimate end in [human] life is to finish God’s work, to bring to full growth the capacities and talents in all of us." Hawking, too, exploring the Universe to know the mind of God, is more Creator's helper than debunker.

Frank: End of our dialogue. Thank you for being here.

Note: E-mail us for footnotes and references or to send comments: bfparker@frontiernet.net