He sees a universe without a beginning, end, or edges.

September 30, 1999

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Hawking Draws the Shape of Time

By William J. Cromie
Gazette Staff

Stephen Hawking’s theory of the universe leaves God with nothing to do.

The universe is completely self-contained; finite but without edges, he said during lectures at Harvard University on Monday and Tuesday. Such a universe would not be affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just be.

What place then for a Creator? Hawking asks.

He elaborated on these ideas during lectures given Sept. 27 and 28 at Sanders Theatre. A third is scheduled for Oct. 5 at the same location. They are part of the Morris Loeb lectures program, presented by the Department of Physics.

The Department made available 3,345 free tickets, and all were claimed in less than an hour.

Hawking, 57, has been confined to a wheelchair with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) since age 21, and now has use of only two fingers on his left hand. He also lost his voice in 1985 and uses his two fingers to operate a speech synthesizer mounted on the front of his wheelchair. Despite these limits, Hawking is regarded as a towering figure in theoretical studies of the past, present, and future of the universe. His ideas have changed the world’s view of time, space, and the shape of the universe.

Dwarfed by the cavernous stage of Sanders Theatre and sitting motionless, Hawking is still able to smile and quip about both his disabilities and the vagaries the universe. He noted that his electronic speech is much clearer than when he gave Loeb lectures at Harvard in 1982 in his then natural but faltering British accent. "My accent is now described by various people as Scandinavian, American, or Irish," he says.

Discussing the theoretical possibility of an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of futures, he joked that "theoretically there exists a universe where the [Washington] Redskins won the Super Bowl, but its probability is very low."

Hawking received an h onorary degree from Harvard in 1990 and is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University – a post formerly held by such influential thinkers as Isaac Newton and Paul Dirac. "We held the same chair, but theirs were not electronic," Hawking quipped.

As Time Goes By
Hawking’s first lecture was aimed at the general public, but it was considered by many to be difficult for those without a thorough background in theoretical physics. The second and third lectures were designed for specialized audiences.

After his 1982 Loeb lectures, Hawking decided to write a popular book that made the esoteric ideas of theoretical physics accessible to those without any formal knowledge of the subject. Titled A Brief History of Time, the book was published in 1988. He brings his own thinking about the universe up to date in the Loeb lectures and in a presentation for the public at the Wang Center in Boston, scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 7.

In his first Loeb lecture, Hawking noted that Newton, in the 17th century, believed that time was infinite; it had no beginning or end. That led the philosopher Immanual Kant to ask: "Why did God wait so long to create the universe – what was he doing before?"

St. Augustine reportedly answered: "Creating hell for people who ask questions like that."

Hawking has created his own hell for people who ask about what happened before and what will happen after the universe. His answer is "nothing."

He described how Albert Einstein, with his mind, welded time and space inseparably together. In this kind of space-time, which gravity causes to curve back on itself, there is no difference between the time direction and directions in space. That makes it possible for space-time to be finite in extent but without any boundaries or edges.

Hawking compares such a space-time to "the surface of the Earth but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is fin ite in extent but it doesn’t have any edges." Like Earth, he says, if you travel around it, you come back to the same place. Presumably, you could do the same around the universe, but it would take more time than the age of the universe.

In A Brief History of Time, Hawking comments that "God may know how the universe began, but we cannot give any particular reason for thinking it began one way or the other." The same holds true for the ending. New theories of space-time have opened up the possibility that we do not have to appeal to God to set the boundaries of the universe; the laws of science are all that are needed.

Details of how the universe came into being and how and when it will end await discovery of a scientific law that unifies all the real and theoretical forces and particles we know about or postulate, Hawking writes. But that still won’t answer the question, why is there a universe?

Hawking is fond of saying: "If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God."