Ideas that hurt your head

The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life
By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Published by Bantam Books, 2012
Available at leading bookshops

It takes a lot of chutzpah to review a book you don’t understand. But I’m going to do that anyway, just to give readers a preview of what they’re in for. No doubt many will achieve understanding where my lesser brain has failed.
     Stephen Hawking is widely reputed to be the smartest man alive. Unfortunately his field is physics, whose finer points are notoriously difficult to explain to those of us who aren’t. Hawking encountered this problem in an earlier book, “A Brief History of Time”. Famously warned that every equation he included would reduce sales by half, he included only one. Even that may have been too much, for although the book was a best-seller, many readers failed to get through it, including me, even though Hawking enlivened it with jokes to nurse us along.
     His latest book has a collaborator, Leonard Mlodinow, also a physicist of repute, and presumably good with jokes. The title, and its grandiose subtitle, seduced me into buying the book. But I have a feeling that the publishers came up with both. If the book is to believed, there is no “grand design” that we can comprehend, and there are no answers – yet – to “the ultimate questions of life”. There is only uncertainty and unpredictability, and chowderheads like me, who crave definite answers, have our heads screwed on wrong. 
     Some of the jokes are very funny, and I was chuckling along merrily until I got to this passage in Chapter 3: “There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations.”
     That passage stopped me cold, and from then on all the jokes in the world couldn’t mask the dreadful fact that this is a book about physics. I felt like an illiterate medieval peasant up to his knees in mud, leaning on his hoe and gawking up at Thomas Aquinas as he declaimed from his Summa Theologica in chaste Latin.
     Hawking compares our condition to that of a goldfish in a bowl. The bowl distorts the goldfish’s perceptions of what’s outside it. But because the goldfish has only its perceptions to work from, it learns how to navigate its way around the bowl based on those perceptions. If the bowl were to be smashed, the goldfish would suddenly be confronted by a new set of perceptions that it would have no idea how to cope with.
     We, Hawking is saying, are like that goldfish. Earlier philosophers have pointed out that we cannot know things “as they are”, because all our information is filtered through faulty sense organs. Hawking adds that our brains then organise that information into patterns they feel comfortable with. The result is a picture of “reality” that is entirely subjective and has no objectively verifiable counterpart.
     From there on it was one mind-boggling observation after another, accompanied by growing bewilderment. Not only was I standing in the mud goggling up at Aquinas and struggling to decipher his Latin, I was receiving repeated blows on the head with a sledgehammer at the same time. By Chapter 4 I was so dazed I could barely focus. Halfway through the book, with my brain bombarded by buckyballs, wave-particle duality, Planck’s constant, Feynman paths, fermions, mesons and quarks, this medieval peasant ran screaming from the muddy field. And I hadn’t even got to multiple universes yet.
     “Quantum physics,” Hawking assures us, “is a new model of reality that gives us a picture of the universe … in which many concepts fundamental to our intuitive understanding of reality no longer have meaning.” Translation: We don’t know beans.
But does quantum physics have the answer? Not quite. Early in the book Hawking boldly champions scientific determinism, the belief that everything is determined by natural laws. “Biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and are therefore as determined as the orbits of the planets … Our physical brain … determines our actions … We are no more than biological machines and … free will is just an illusion.”
     That’s good news for some of us. Next time I pick myself up off the floor after a night of inordinate carousing, I’ll blame physics and chemistry. But even scientific determinism doesn’t have all the answers, and Hawking is forced to temper his boldness: “The laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.” Anyone who has ever waited for the cool season to arrive in Thailand will understand this.
     So good luck with this book. I didn’t understand it, but it seemed to echo an idea in an older book that I understand a little better. That book is the Diamond Sutra, and the speaker is the Buddha, who advises the elder Subhuti: “All phenomena are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble and a shadow, like dew and lightning.”
     Or maybe just the view from inside a goldfish bowl.