Hawking is Taliban says Baroness Greenfield

[naymissus]

Baroness Greenfield on R4 this morning regretted the sensationalism of Stephen Hawking's claim that God is unnecessary. She reminded us of Faraday who said; 'Beware - there is nothing more frightening than someone who knows that he is right'

She regretted the fundamentalist Taliban-tendency in some of today's scientists

Hurrah!

[pippa]

Sept 8, 2010 7:49:45 GMT @naymissus said:

Baroness Greenfield on R4 this morning regretted the sensationalism of Stephen Hawking's claim that God is unnecessary. She reminded us of Faraday who said; 'Beware - there is nothing more frightening than someone who knows that he is right'

She regretted the fundamentalist Taliban-tendency in some of today's scientists

Hurrah!

some facts can stare you in the face though.


as far as i know he said " “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

however, is saying that god is not necessary, definitely ruling out any existance of god? perhaps he is just saying that creation is possible without god - could be one or the other - god knows!
god is nothing - something from nothing - it's a mythtery.



(bold text added)

[pippa]

i've been exploring and still dont see that Hawkng is saying that god does not exist.

apparently In "The Grand Design," Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow suggest that physics and metaphysics are merging.

if 'laws' of physics and the universe exist, how do those laws come about?


i found this review, special to the Los Angeles TImes, of Stephen Hawking's book by the author Michael Moorcock

www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-stephen-hawking-20100905,0,2573263.story


also a link to a blog which i think has interesting opinions, as well as the comments section.
in it there is suggestion that lazy reporters are spinning it. journalists love an anti-christian propaganda story. they say there is no turn around from Stephen Hawkings previous position.

churchmousepublishing.blogspot.com/2010/09/stephen-hawking-and-god-lazy-reporters.html

[aquatic]

Good detective work, pippa.

It seems to me that people of faith could draw strength from what SH said, as they're given an opportunity to explain how their faith does point to the existence of God (which SH hasn't denied).

Why people of faith should appear to want to misread him is, I suppose, a matter between them and their God(s).

[pippa]

absolutely aqua. i cant see why the notion of god(s) cannot be considered likely to be more complex than anything ever dreamed of.

already there are vastly different perceptions of god arrived at by the different confines of christianity all bound within their orthodoxy, and yet they all read the same book. perhaps even the enochian giants might not sound so far fetched

on a personal level i love the idea of a multiverse, 10 or 11 dimensions, black holes, super black holes, dark matter, dark energy, string theory, M-theory, alternate pasts and alternate futures.

[naymissus]

Well
Have you ever been called into the Manager's Office and told that you are 'not necessary' to the Company's operation?

Here is something I prepared earlier:

Maxwell showed that the Aether was 'not necessary' for the propagation of em waves.
The aether was abandoned as redundant, not necessary, worthless, Superfluous, needless, immaterial, unessential, verbose, empty, out-of-operation, expendable, useless, groundless, unrequired, unwanted, plangent, no f*****g use-to-man-nor-beast, not-wanted-on-voyage, have-to-let-go-of-it, transferred to Job-seeker-allowance, personna non grata, dead in the water, come-in-no.1-your-time-is-up, f****d - nobody even speaks of the aether now.


Make no mistake, that would be the fate of God under the egregiously arrogant Hawking

Do you know of any other serious scientific work that invokes God?
Is it necessary to the scientific work?
Of course bloody not!

It is simply Hawking weakly acting upon the advice of his publishers to include a reference to God in order to increase interest and book sales.

He ia an illogical prat anywy. If only em and gravity wayves are necessary to create the Universe, where did em and gravity waves come from

Pretending that he knows God is not necessary when he cannot even explain Dark Matter.

Bloody cheapskate publicity-seeking, mercenary scientist.

Does sceince a dis-service

[aubrey]

What's your problem? You don't believe him, so why are you so bothered?

And where the fuck did god come from?

Do you think it would be better if people like Hawkins could have hot irons applied to their knackers until they recanted? That used to be the church's prefered method of showing it was right.

[naymissus]

Sept 9, 2010 18:43:17 GMT aubrey said:

What's your problem? You don't believe him, so why are you so bothered?

And where the fuck did god come from?

Do you think it would be better if people like Hawkins could have hot irons applied to their knackers until they recanted? That used to be the church's prefered method of showing it was right.

More from the silly sausage store.

[aubrey]

But why does it bother you? That's a reasonable question, isn't it?

Is you faith so weak that any comment from a scientist puts more holes in it? What do you think it would be like for me if I was like that, wandering about and seeing churches and crucifixes everywhere?


And did the church torture Galileo until he said an untruth, or not?

[naymissus]

Sept 11, 2010 10:13:53 GMT aubrey said:

And did the church torture Galileo until he said an untruth, or not?

No they didn't you silly sausage!

[aubrey]

Ok, they threatened him:

The grand play ran its course, with the Pope insisting upon a formal sentence, a tough examination of Galileo, public abjuration, and "formal prison." Galileo was forced to appear once again for formal questioning about his true feelings concerning the Copernican system. Galileo obliged, so as not to risk being branded a heretic, testifying that "I held, as I still hold, as most true and indisputable, the opinion of Ptolemy, that is to say, the stability of the Earth and the motion of the Sun." Galileo's renunciation of Copernicanism ended with the words, "I affirm, therefore, on my conscience, that I do not now hold the condemned opinion and have not held it since the decision of authorities....I am here in your hands--do with me what you please."

[MrSonde]

Maxwell showed that the Aether was 'not necessary' for the propagation of em waves.

He certainly did not! The aether was revived as a seriously entertained hypothetical entity in physics because of Maxwell's equations, not despite of them.

The aether was abandoned as redundant, not necessary,

No it wasn't. It fell out of favour primarily due to a radical change in the epistemological stance of the most prominent physicists that occurred more or less during the 1920s, when physics came under the sway of a strict logical positivism and dogmatic instrumentalism. Primarily. A fundamental misinterpratation of Michelson-Morley persuaded your average experimental physicist on the other hand - the "normal scientist" - and then following the corroboration of Einstein's General Relativity by Eddington in 1918 a historical error was made in assigning Lorentz's special Relativity Theory to Einstein. Lorentz's theory, which is mathematically identical to Einstein's, though predates it by several years, explicitly states that the Aether is absolutely necessary in assigning physical meaning to the equations. Einstein disagreed and dispensed with it. Later however he was adamant that this had been a mistake, and that the only way to make sense of quantum electrodynamics and General Relativity was to acknowledge that they both depended on a universal Aether. Dirac was in complete agreement with this, as was Feynman.

worthless, Superfluous, needless, immaterial, unessential, verbose, empty, out-of-operation, expendable, useless, groundless, unrequired, unwanted, plangent, no f*****g use-to-man-nor-beast, not-wanted-on-voyage, have-to-let-go-of-it, transferred to Job-seeker-allowance, personna non grata, dead in the water, come-in-no.1-your-time-is-up, f****d - nobody even speaks of the aether now.

Yes they do, they speak of it all the time. They just call it the "zero-point vacuum or plenum" in QED and the various string theories, or the universal tensor field in GR.

[naymissus]

Sept 21, 2010 11:22:53 GMT @MrSonde said:

Maxwell showed that the Aether was 'not necessary' for the propagation of em waves.

He certainly did not! The aether was revived as a seriously entertained hypothetical entity in physics because of Maxwell's equations, not despite of them.

Really?
Maxwell's equations showed that em waves would propagate through a vacuum - no necessity for an 'aether'

Incidentally welcome back Nicholas!
But don't hide. I will not bite you

worthless, Superfluous, needless, immaterial, unessential, verbose, empty, out-of-operation, expendable, useless, groundless, unrequired, unwanted, plangent, no f*****g use-to-man-nor-beast, not-wanted-on-voyage, have-to-let-go-of-it, transferred to Job-seeker-allowance, personna non grata, dead in the water, come-in-no.1-your-time-is-up, f****d - nobody even speaks of the aether now

Yes they do, they speak of it all the time. They just call it the "zero-point vacuum or plenum" in QED and the various string theories, or the universal tensor field in GR.

;D You mean the speak of an aether that is necessary to propagate em waves?

[MrSonde]

Really?
Maxwell's equations showed that em waves would propagate through a vacuum - no necessity for an 'aether'

The equations show that em waves propagate - what term in Maxwell's equations do you take to symbolise a vacuum? There isn't one - there's no term for any sort of medium at all, that's not what they're describing. What they show is that if you have a moving electric charge there will at the same time be a moving magnetic field orthogonal to it, and that they will move in a helical relationship, continually generating each other. That's all.

Now, before this theory no one talked about an "aether" - it hadn't been a serious topic for discussion since the pre-Socratic Greeks, when it meant something rather different. But once Faraday had discovered the reciprocal relationship between magnetism and moving electrical charge, and Maxwell had mathematically shown this to be necessary and inviolate, every physicist realised that the previously accepted Newtonian commonsense notion of Space as an empty "box" - an infinite abstraction of experienced "place" - was inadequate. What was it that supported these moving waves? It had to be something more causally effective than the previously accepted nothing, a vacuum, because suddenly Galileo's Principle of Relativity - a fundamental cornerstone of Newtonian physics - was being violated. According to this, there should be no means, no experiment that one could possibly perform, to demonstrate whether one was moving or not (unless one was accelerating.) But now you have a discovery that proves that if an electric charge moves it will generate a magnetic field also. Suddenly Space is no longer a purely relational abstraction - the gap between places - it apparently has properties that are invariant without reference to any place at all. The "aether" was proposed as a general hypothesised notion to account for this power.

Incidentally welcome back Nicholas!

Why thankyou Joe, very moving. Now I'm back online again at home I'll call in more often, just to cheer you up. If I can only remember my password.

But don't hide. I will not bite you

Don't go changing your character on my account, you've rather grown on me.

You mean the speak of an aether that is necessary to propagate em waves?

The propagation isn't the issue - Maxwell shows that must occur, through time. The issues that led to the postulation of an aether to account for waves remain. What are they waves of? How can one give meaning to a wave - a definite three-dimensional shape, described by the equations, which exists whether there is any other object in the Universe to refer it to - to reference the shape and its topological directions - or not?

[Joe K]

Indeed, Pippa has made a point which seems to have eluded Baroness Greenfield, that there's nothing controversial or dogmatic about saying that 'God' is unnecessary.

Incidentally, although Greenfield wrote some interesting articles about the mind back when I read broadsheets, and had a series on Radio 4, the wife can't stand her, but seems to be fine with Hawkings. I also seem to recall that Greenfield is Jewish, from that programme about Albert Hoffman.