I have used some materiel in this blog from an earlier write up of mine 'EVERY MAN's HAWKING which appeared in a local news paper quite sometime back.
While we mourn the death of Stephen Hawking we can chuckle at the discomfiture of God; He would be forced to welcome to heaven the man who debunked the myth that He had created the universe.Science today is more and more a collective
enterprise; flashes of intuitive insight or dreams like Edward Kekule’s are
rare. Many researchers simultaneously come upon an idea. Ever since Paul
Lemaitre proposed his theory of the Big Bang Origin of Universe a host of scientists
and researchers- George Gamov, Steven Weinberg, Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson,
David Schramm and above all Roger Penrose, to name just a few have refined it
and provided its mathematical validation and prepared the ground work for Hawking
but they largely remain unknown to the lay public. Stephen Hawking in a flash
of brilliance, among many other theories, proposed the extinction of Black Holes as a result of its leaking radiation. Black holes are the debris of massive stars and everything within the range of its immense gravitational pull
is forever destined to end up inside it. Ever since cosmology has become
quotidian and the man called Hawking something of a cult! More than a scientist
whose contribution was enormous, he became a raging, post modernist cultural
phenomenon. He finally lost out to death, yesterday, at the age of seventy six
and commoners as well as followers of the recondite discipline mourn his death
alike.
When Einstein came up with his theory of
relativity there were not many people who could comprehend it. In fact in a
lecture seminar, in the early years of his Theory, he was left wondering, in
all humility, as to who was the third person beside he himself and the host,
who understood relativity. Even Neil's Bohr once said of quantum mechanics
"If you think you understand it that only shows that you don't know the
first thing about it."
They were both modest people. They
believed that scientific ideas had a life of their own in
the highly restricted and restrictive symbolic language of say the tensor
algebra or non-Euclidean geometry; tools forged and perfected for this purpose.
If the contemporary mathematics, which was of considerable sophistication,
could not cope with the exegesis and implications of relativity, how can
language of daily speech? Scientists, alas! by the nature of their esoteric
craft were destined to be a small aristocracy of knowledge.
Einstein was a Promethean figure;
he wrested the closely guarded secrets of the universe from the Gods. As Roland Barth, the French semioticist put
it, “There is a single secret to the world, and this secret is held in a word;
the universe is a safe of which humanity seeks the combination: Einstein almost
found it.” Hawking was seen as a successor to Einstein; he personified the
hopes of completing the scientific enterprise that Einstein left behind: fusing
quantum mechanics and general relativity in a single seamless
"unified" theory. Brief, succinct, and accessible to all, in the same
frugal mode as e=mc2.
In the
beginning was the word! And ironically enough the hope for uttering the
ultimate secret of the universe fell to the lot of a man who was denied the
gift of speech. Hawkings' peculiar ailment- Louis Gehrig disorder - now as well
known as the man himself- had rendered him totally incapable of caring for
himself but it in no way incapacitated the magical brain.Is it that the body
had been victimized by a preternaturally active mind or had the mind been
compensated in a prodigious manner for the decrepit frame? The synthesized
voice emanating through a computer seemed to prefigure the cybernetic utopia of
a disembodied mind; of pure intellect, independent of the gross physical frame.
People looked up to him for: REVELATION something that was in the domain of
religion. Hawking was the new God.
There is
another bit of delicious irony at work here. Stephen Hawking was in search of
totalizing explanations, the "grand narrative," on the basis of his
observations and experiments with the four basic scientific constructs space,
time, matter and number. But the post-modernist ethos which 'is suspicious of
any claim to absolute, authentic truth etc’ has appropriated him as one of its
most celebrated icons; and for Good reasons too!
Make room Mr. Neils Bohr, here
comes Stephen Hawking. His A Brief History of Time, in consonance with the
cultural logic of late capitalism, declares esoteric scientific knowledge to be
the estate of common man. His majesty the Consumer King is entitled to
undertake an intellectual safari to the world of high science where, instead of
monkeys gamboling, they have electrons jumping from one orbit to another-
disappearing from one and materializing into another without so much as a trace
of the intervening spaces; one moment it was in this orbit the next in a higher
or lower orbit without traveling the intervening distance. Such rare nuggets of
scientific curiousity like Pauli’s exclusion principle, or time reversal
asymmetry, or naked singularity are strewn across the pages, to be enjoyed,
flaunted, or stored away in the attic of the brain.
Did Stephen Hawking really succeed in ushering intellectual democracy? Do we really understand the concepts of quantum cosmology- event horizon,
naked singularity, entropy-wormholes or time dilation that have entered the language of
public discourse? Have issues as
hopelessly divorced from reality and beyond any empirical validation-is it an
inflationary universe, would the Big Bang be followed by the Big Crunch become
the concern of common man or are these just an amusing diversion? It is a
participatory universe; there is no reality outside one's own observation of
it; by the merest act of observation one influences the observed system which
chimes very well with the postmodernist claim in the process of deconstruction whatever random insights the masses
can bring upon the nature of the cosmological reality is fair and valid.
The man, who was the expositor of
the ideas on the frontiers of physics and cosmology, seemed to have become a
rock star and the esoteric bit of knowledge that he spewed became the most
happening performance to watch. I had
some years back ,with great
effort, secured a seat in the hall of wisdom where he lectured to a motley group
of people, scientists, academicians, industrialists, political big wigs, civil
servants and humble folks like us, unlettered in the vocabulary of science, nevertheless
no less keen to know what he had to say.
The "artist, illusionist,
cosmic joker”, knew how to play up to the gallery, to the cultural market place
where kitsch and imitation art, where comic book version of Shakespeare often
do duty for the real thing. In the process he “sold about (8.5million)one copy
for every 750 men, women and children of the world… I have sold more books on
physics than Madonna on sex”. (Foreword to the illustrated A Brief History of
Time; Bantam).If someone could persuade you to buy abstruse texts in preference
to titillating tomes on sex, he had to be a charmer par excellence.
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