Stephen Hawking’s Fundamental Blunder

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…by Jonas E. Alexis

Stephen Hawking, who has just passed away, was unquestionably a mathematical genius.[1] He and Roger Penrose put the age-old question to rest when they the declare that all the evidence has shown us that the universe began to exist.[2] Other cosmologists such as Alex Vilenkin came to the same conclusion.[3]

But like Isaac Newton before him, Hawking used his position as one of the leading figures in mathematical physics to smuggle in incoherent ideas on the universe itself. E. Michael Jones has meticulously documented that Newton used the inverse square law (which by the way is true) to unleash incoherent ideas onto the universe.[4] Hawking was indirectly following the footsteps of his antecedent.

Hawking posited the claim that “Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.”[5] With all due respect to Hawking, this is logically incoherent and therefore worthless. As Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John C. Lennox notes in his critique of Hawking’s view,

“If we say that ‘X creates Y,’ we presuppose the existence of X in the first place in order to bring Y into existence. That is a simple matter of understanding what the words ‘X creates Y’ mean. If, therefore, we say ‘X creates X,’ we imply that we are presupposing the existence of X in order to account for the existence of X.



“This is obviously self-contradictory and thus logically incoherent—even if we put X equal to the universe! To presuppose the existence of the universe to account for its own existence sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland, not science.”[6]

But because Hawking was trying to escape the conclusion that a “super-intellect has monkeyed with physics,” to borrow Sir Fred Hoyle’s phraseology,[7] Hawking had to believe the unbelievable. This was one reason why he was also advocating the multi-verse theory.

Hawking and his coauthor Leonard Mlodinow declared in The Grand Design that M-theory “predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god.”[8]

Where did these multiverses come from? Hawking and Mlodinow tell us that they “arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science.”[9] Hawking and Mlodinow are locked into this circular reasoning because they obviously did not want to consider the “super-intellect” that Hoyle talked about.

 

Hawking and Mlodinow could not see that adding an unlimited number of parallel universes will not and can never answer the question of how our universe was created. These arguments are merely smokescreens to deflect attention away from the inherent deficiencies of the “universe create itself” hypothesis.

It was one thing for Hawking and Mlodinow to confidently posit these assertions as axiomatic, but it was quite another to provide scientific foundations for them. If multiple universes arise naturally from the physical law, where did the physical law come from in the first place? If multiple universes are a prediction of science, then science must be able to give us at least some scientific explanation for this. Again John Lennox addresses the underlying flaws of this theory:

“Physical laws cannot create anything. They are a description of what normally happens under certain given conditions…The sun rises in the east every day, but this law does not create the sun; nor the planet earth, with east and west. The law is descriptive and predictive, but it is not creative. Similarly Newton’s law of gravitation does not create gravity or the matter on which gravity acts.”[10]

Because there is no scientific or rational backbone supporting Hawking’s multiverse theory, fellow intellectuals such as Paul Davies and Richard Swinburne completely reject it. Swinburne states, “It’s crazy to postulate a trillion (causally unconnected) universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity will do the job.”[11]

Physicist Steven Weinberg lamented that multiple universes “are very speculative…without any experimental support” and physicist Lee Smolin called it “a fantasy,” even though he promoted it in his book. Roger Penrose, who is far from thrilled with Hawking’s new book, declares in his response to The Grand Design that “M-theory enjoys no observational support whatsoever.”[12]

Physicist Peter Woit of Columbia University was also disappointed at The Grand Design’s heavy reliance on M-theory, which he sees as sheer speculation.[13]

Because Hawking and Mlodinow jumped on the multiverse idea without first pulling together scientific backing, John Horgan of Scientific American denounces Hawking’s “‘new’ theory” as “the same old crap.”[14] The lack of scientific evidence for M-theory has also been dismissed by physicists such as Frank Close, Jon Butterworth, and Jim Al-Khalili.[15]

Speculation about multiple universes aside, there are basic yet profound questions—such as why human beings matter, why there is a universe after all, and why the laws of the universe seem to correspond to the rational human mind—that science cannot explain. Nobelist Sir Peter Medawar called this the limit of science.[16]

Leaving all this aside, I agree with Hawking that “Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking.”

Both speech and language, as E. Michael Jones has recently pointed out in his review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,

“are subsumed under the Greek word Logos. Speech, it turns out, is the main characteristic that distinguishes man from animals. The ancient Greeks understood that man was different from all other animals because of the fact that he could speak. The word they used for rationality was “logos,” which is also the word for speech, discourse, language, and other related concepts.

“Logos is “the word or that by which the inward thought is expressed”; it is equivalent to the Latin words “ratio,” “vox,” and “oratio,” or “that which is said or spoken.” It is frequently translated as “word,” “language,” or “talk,” as in a saying or statement, or maxim, or maxim or resolution. It can also be translated as speech, discourse or conversation as well as the power to speak. From these more basic ideas flows the idea of rationality itself.

“Logos means both thought and reason. When Democritus says that something is “kata logon,” he means that it is “agreeable to reason.” Logos becomes, therefore, the distinguishing feature of a human being. “En Andros logo einai” means “to be reckoned as a man.” “Ho Logos” comprises both the sense of thought and word when it is used in the New Testament.

“After meditating on the by then thousand-year-old concept of logos, the medieval scholastic successors to the Greek philosophers coined the term “rational animal” (animale rationale) as the essential definition of man. Unlike angels, man had a body similar to the bodies of other animals. His distinguishing characteristic, however, was the fact that he could speak and reason, terms subsumed under the Greek term logos.”[17]

In short, language and speech inexorably show that logos is at work in the universe. This also shows that the universe is comprehensible and meaningful. The universe is not meaningless, as Steven Weinberg and others have propounded. If it is meaningful, then perhaps we need to find out its metaphysical meaning and purpose.


  • [1] See for example Stephen Hawking, God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History (Philadelphia: Running Press Book Publishers, 2000).
  • [2] Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 20.
  • [3] Vilenkin declares: “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.” Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 176.
  • [4] E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014), 445-496. This is too much to detail here.
  • [5] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Random House, 2010), 180.
  • [6] See John Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking, kindle edition.
  • [7] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe,” Engineering and Science, November 1981.
  • [8] Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, 8.
  • [9] Ibid., 8-9.
  • [10] Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking, 40.
  • [11] Quoted in Antony Flew, There is a God (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 118-119.
  • [12] Roger Penrose, “The Grand Design,” Financial Times, September 4, 2010.
  • [13] Peter Woit, “Hawking Gives Up” (blog post at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3141).
  • [14] John Horgan, “Cosmic Clowning: Stephen Hawking’s ‘new’ Theory of Everything is the Same Old CRAP,” Scientific American, September 13, 2010.
  • [15] Lennox, God and Stephen Hawking.
  • [16] See Peter W. Medawar, The Limits of Science (New York: HarperCollins, 1984).
  • [17] E. Michael Jones, “Sapiens,” Culture Wars, March 2018.

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29 COMMENTS

  1. To Gary Clevenger, Gary I believe `Time` does not exist. It is a product of the human mind, we invented `Time` to bring order to our existence . To put it simply imagine a universe without any intelligent life. No intelligent life equals no `Time`, it is purely a physical mental invention .

  2. Roger Penrose, who is far from thrilled with Hawking’s new book, declares in his response to The Grand Design that “M-theory enjoys no observational support whatsoever.” the same can be said of xtianity’s claim that jesus walked on water.

  3. Amelius,

    So I went over your math and what your telling me,
    is that there is a chance. (for chaos)
    Which brings us back to this odd presidential moment in history.

    • Ya, a .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance. Far beyond mathatical impossibility.

  4. I, a common layman will remove the aether from your experiments, and have my friends remove the word from all dictionaries to prove it doesn’t exist. Then I will declare space to be a vacuum, just a black void, after which I will draw my universe upon my new clean slate. When you ask how can that be, I will cover my new blackboard with magical never ending equations designed to put the most keen minds to sleep where they will dream of thousands of universes all lighted with nuclear powered suns. Then my friends and I will halt all further research, and all further progress in anything electrical for the next 200 years. All this to prove there is no God, for if there was he would surely stop me. For answers to all other queries you must seek out Quora where reason has no rules, and discourse is what I say it is.
    Ian thanks for vouching for the Hawkings double theory. For the longest time I got the weirdest looks if I mentioned the possibility. They made me feel like I was abusing the handicapped, or a revisionist so I stopped. I’ll give it another try.

  5. A while back, I’m sure one of the editors at VT told us to report when we have trouble logging on to the site, so I am reporting it now. Immediately after making my last comment (8:11), I refreshed the page and got this notification:

    “Internal Server Error
    The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@veteranstoday.com to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
    More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

    Error 524 Ray ID: 3fc317241d283f9b • 2018-03-16 00:28:28 UTC”

    Also, on March 8th, I had trouble viewing the site from 6:45 pm to 11:00 pm. “Error establishing a database connection.”

  6. Can a vessel question its maker?

    Isaiah 29:16 (KJVA) Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding ?

  7. John Z,

    We are not talking about “casting the first stone” or perfection or even the pope here. Please, focus. Hawking made a fundamental logical error, and it is ridiculous to even remotely imply that if a person happens to point that out, then somehow he is attacking “this great person.” That just tells me that you have not at all even crack-opened a science textbook, where scientists themselves criticize each other about certain data. You have just committed one of the most basic errors in logic: straw man.

    You also did not read the article very carefully because I quoted other physicists who took Hawking to task about his error. Were those scientists attacking Hawking or the incoherent ideas that he was postulating? Let me reiterate, focus on what was said and rebut it with serious counterarguments, not with emotional reaction.

  8. Laws: They are ridiculous on their face … actually just a convenient misnomer from those who want influence.

    When laws relate to physics, they re not rules … they are repeatable observations that come about as “principles”. When laws relate to human behavior they “are” rules that undermine “principles”.

    If you recognize a principle (e.g. killing is bad), all that laws related to that principle do is open a hole in the principle. Killing is bad … but the death penalty is lawful. Killing is bad … but “authorities” are “authorized to do it lawfully”. And now you’re on the slippery slope. You now have to enumerate all cases where deviation from the principle is ok … or where the exception to the physical principle is understood.

    And this now leads to 40,000 new human laws (rules) each year … eliminating the usefulness of laws altogether.

    And this leads to the movement of physical problems into domains that escape observation … and thus they can claim exceptions to the principles in the new domain.

    We’ve been here many times before folks. One of the interesting and relatively recent instances is the case of Heaviside and his Telegraph equation. It went against all approved laws … but made the oceanic cables work … so they had to finally give in to the truth he knew all along.

  9. But there is something magic on inverse square law. Not only gravitation and electric fields but also weakness is strenght and vice versa By the NT. On the latter one the independent and dependent variables are of the same dimension, which sounds more like Newton iteration of spirit wheter it converges or diverges. I do not live in self delusions, I don’t know myself. But Master does know. I have to find a wormhole between those two parallel existences to ask my Master. Which He already answered that seek the Truth, You’ll find the Path and You will got the Life. That question is egocentric BTW.

  10. I first want to emphasize that this iwas Hawkins II, not Hawkins I. He died years ago which is part of the whole scam.

    One of the most astounding thing about Hawkins is that fact that he was a central part of an alchemical process, which is best termed scientism.

    As Jones wrote at the beginning, Hawkins was a mathematical educated man. Most people don’t know, but he never had anything to do with any form of real physics. Because this alchemical process already started some hundreds of years ago (including John Dee, Francis Bacon, Issac Newton – all high initiated Rosecrutians and for the most time very well versed and active alchemists), we have to look at all of this not from a preudo scientific standpoint – because it truely never was ment to be – but rather from a specialized form of strict hermetical arts.

    Newton already fudged at so many points of his famous work, doing some dirty tricks and this rather elaborate game went on, beeing alchemical transformed in a pure abstract (or mathematical) category, masterfully untouched by any form of reality but driftiing right into a strange form of scientism religion. Bravo!

    • That motion of the spheres on the video is combination of translation and rotation motion and doesn’t apply to high speed “nondimensional” particles like electrons. To verify the experiment the end velocity of both spheres must have been measured, which gives the end translational and rotational energies of both. If those are different, frictional forces are present, air, changin rolling rotational axis on spherical route which arises contact friction with the pipe etc.

    • If anybody might be interested in more details, I would highly regard “Miles W. Mathis”. Take a pen and some paper and start a fascinating yourney of science (pysics), which might take you offroad for the next ten years.

      If you dig deeper into it, you might learn some amazing stuff, which mathematicians will never understand. For instance the fact that for angular motions you’ll have to work with PI=4. TThe experimental proof can be found here:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhuvUSS3KAE

      You even might rethink some basic analysis, parts of the theory of relativity, the whole spin theory, the so called and also totally alchemical “Standard Model” which might be the biggest scientific fraud in the history and much, much more.

      Without your own work and study though this site might shurely be “too much input”. As a studied mathematician and physicist I can highly reccommend him and you have the additional advantage of English at your hands.

  11. “Hawking and Mlodinow are locked into this circular reasoning because they obviously did not want to consider the “super-intellect” that Hoyle talked about.”

    But mysticists everywhere (especially the intelligent design ones) have absolutely no trouble dispensing with moving back one step in their mysticism to explain what created the “super intellect”. They just totally ignore that possibility … i.e. necessity.

  12. @ Detlef Reimers
    I first want to emphasize that this was Hawkins II, not Hawkins I. He died years ago which is part of the whole scam.

    Thanks for posting that. Anyone who wants documentation of Hawkings’ being replaced by a ringer can find it here:

    http://milesmathis.com/hawk3.pdf

    • I was convinced that Hawking was replaced years ago, the teeth are the giveaway, you simply can’t change a person’s teeth to that extent.

      So, if the ‘blunder’ was made by the real Hawking, then that is one thing, but if it was part of the ‘work’ released after his death when the imposter was playing him, then that’s another thing entirely and probably means it was no blunder at all, just disinfo.

    • Thanks for sharing this. I really like the way the author presented the information as evidence and not “proof”, as you cannot “prove” anything to anyone. He stresses that everyone must do their own research and come to their own conclusions. So true. He provides a solid case. Here’s a quote from the end of the article that I really enjoyed.

      “The rich can no longer collect art, since they have destroyed it. They can no longer have the joy of underwriting real science, since they have destroyed it. They can’t collect books or poetry, since they have destroyed both literature and poetry. They can’t enjoy the company of innocent youths, since they have destroyed the innocence of youth. They can’t enjoy love, because they have destroyed it for profit. They can’t enjoy beautiful architecture, because they have destroyed it. And they can’t enjoy the feeling of a day well spent, because their days aren’t well spent. That is the thing about dirty money and a dirty conscience: no matter how much you spend, you can’t hire someone to clean it.”

    • Also, the pictures showing Hawking getting younger with age reminded me of those BS photos/videos put out by Rita Katz and Co. showing Bin Ladin, years after he died, getting younger as time passed. Even though Bin Ladin died of Marfan’s syndrome in 2001, the pictures/videos put out after his death showed him getting fatter, shorter and younger. Oh… and the lefty writing with his right hand. As Stephen Hawking was a valuable PR personality for aquiring massive funding for scientific endeavors, Bin Ladin was a valuable PR personality for aquiring massive funding for the Millitary Industrial Complex and he provided a pretext for US intervention all over the M.E. So, they kept his ghost alive for a decade for these purposes, then Obama saw an opportunity to be re-elected on the lie that his administration got Bin Ladin and his ghost was finally laid to rest.

    • Miles Matthis postulates the real Hawking died in the late 1980s. Of course, I have no idea if this is true, but if you look at the photos Matthis presents and the fact that Hawking survived over 50 years with ALS, which is 3 decades longer than any other sufferer, then there may well be something to Matthis’ thesis. If Matthis is correct, then assessment of Hawking’s published work post 1980s needs to consider this.

    • I would have to disagree with Matthis on this point. There is way too much evidence showring that Hawking was alive in the 1980s and beyond. However, we can question the intellectual substance in The Grand Design because it doesn’t seem to reflect what Hawking once believed. Maybe he changed his mind; maybe his coauthor wanted to buttress a worldview. At this point, I honestly don’t know. But A Brief History of Time was more substantive than The Grand Design.

  13. With all due respect to Stephen Hawking (RIP), there are a number of things here on earth that science does not understand well enough to sufficiently and definitively explain, so for a scientist to suggest he can explain the origins of the universe, seems pretty arrogant to me. Most scientists agree that we live in a cause and effect universe, so where does the word “random” fit in here? If every effect has it’s cause, than nothing is random. When men cannot understand the causes of certain effects, they tend to write it off as random, instead of saying there must be a cause but we just don’t understand it yet.

    • When the odds of the amino acid happening by chance, without intention is 1 in 10 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000, than how astronomical are the odds of something far more complex, like a solar system or universe happening by chance? It is mathematically correct to say the odds of this happening are exponentially impossible, so why does science continue to insist that this is the case? Is it because it’s easier to say something is random, than it is to admit they simply do not understand? Just because there are causes of certain effects that are beyond man’s comprehension, does not mean there is no cause.

    • Also, with respect to Stephen Hawking, I hope he was wrong in his assumption that there is no afterlife. I hope he’s enjoying the spiritual dimension right now and finding all the answers to whatever questions he had while he was here on earth. RIP Stephen Hawking.

    • Explain/describe- Sorry, but I don’t see your point? To explain something requires one to describe something..

    • Well, you writing like someone who is above ” menwho cannot understand the causes of certain effects, they tend to write it off as random, instead of saying there must be a cause but we just don’t understand it yet.”, in spite of the fact that “you a mysticist”, please contemplate this.

      If I set up a long line of dominoes and then push them over, there is definitely a cause and effect … but there is definitely randomness at work at the same time. At the very least, my placing of the dominoes has a random attribute. There is absolutely no way I could set up two lines with all the exact same attributes.

      Now, I could have had a purpose in mind for what those dominoes were to do. And it may have even done it as I intended. But then it may not have. If it didn’t, either I made a combination of “random” mistakes, or some “random” perturbation(s) threw things off.

      Rap your mysticist, random free, cause and effect brain around that. God had control, right?

      Re. Hawkings and Einstein and those of their ilk, from what I’ve read (and seen) Heaviside and Tesla brought far more to the party. And like all nonsense, experience and understanding crowd out superstition and hand waving … as we’re seeing more and more of that happening in this cosmology broken (yet proven) math. These guys can (and do) prove up is down and time and space are warped … all to make their math work.

    • Todd, I’m not pretending to be above anyone, nor do I consider my self a “mysticist”. It seems you either missed my point, or are putting words in my mouth, or both. I was saying that even though I don’t understand what causes certain effects, I still know there must be a cause. But, many scientists would rather say these things are random, instead of admitting they don’t understand the cause.

    • Todd, if your dominoes do not fall how you intended, it’s because you made a miscalculation while setting them in place. Sure, you didn’t intend to make a miscalculation, but that mistake is still the cause of the undesirable effect. So, the undesirable effect was not random.

      “Rap your mysticist, random free, cause and effect brain around that. God had control, right?”

      And you accuse me of “writing like someone who is above”??

      Surely, you meant ‘wrap’. See, I can be condescending too! GFYS.

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