A Brief History of Time is ‘wrong’, Stephen Hawking told collaborator
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> Hawking announced: “I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective.”
That said, from the description it’s hard to be sure how much of the new theory Hawking actually agreed with - “I read into his eyes that he agreed with it” doesn’t seem like a basis for authorship.
The paraphrasing you gave over simplified:
“I used to position myself in front of him and fire questions and would look into his eyes to see if he was agreeing or disagreeing. By the end, I could detect several levels of no and several levels of yes with a few in between.”
> Hawking switched to a sensor mounted on his glasses that could be activated by twitching a cheek muscle, but eventually even that become too difficult. > He slowed from a few words per minute to several minutes per word, Hertog said. In the end, communication stopped.
With that said, I'm willing to give Hertog the benefit of the doubt in this case.
As for Hertog, there's a number of people that can and (according to the grapevine) do vouch who have worked with them both over the past decades.
All models are wrong, some are useful.
-- George Box
Very interesting - granted this may be the wrong interpretation but I am very interested in the idea of application of evolutionary process to physical phenomena. Why shouldn’t or why couldn’t so-called natural “laws” face competitive pressure the same way organisms on earth do? Just particles after all. Maybe Darwin had the grand theory all along.
What they propose sounds an awful lot like systems theory to me
Is this distinction as meaningful as it first seems; my assumption was that all 'laws of physics' are in essence only ever an expression of our current best understanding of these observed 'generalised patterns'?
By talking about the 'laws', it's easy to start treating these as though they are firm, a-priori rules, but my assumption was that - to physicists - these were always simply a short-cut way of describing a set of common, repeated and testable observations about the universe. Iow they were never 'rules' in the sense that they existed independent of the phenomena they were describing? I'm not a scientist, btw.
From reading the article this morning I hadn't thought of something like "there sure is a lot of carbon in the universe as far as we know" in terms of natural selection.
But maybe it's circular where "evolution" as it was originally used to describe biological systems/organisms on earth is just a way of describing changes in the universe but locally and specific as well. In other words, Evolution may be the Grand Theory of describing how the universe works and perhaps observing a black hole is akin to observing how elephants behave.
Although as someone else has pointed out here, maybe that theory is bunk too. [1]
> I'm not a scientist, btw.
Same here. I also have not yet had coffee this morning ;)
What would they compete over? What would the mechanisms of mutation and of selection be?
This also would seem to assume that time has to be fundamental and cannot be emergent, for the evolution of laws to happen over time.
Obviously from our observed laws perspective we can find (we did not yet) reasons for such preferences yet changing conditions (time, matter density, energy, velocity, gravity) can potentially influence preferred laws and states of matter. Think of superconductivity, how is it even possible that there is no resistance in electron flow, we only make use of this phenomena without understanding the theory behind it.
I am looking forward for the book, just a tiny glympse of different perspective can influence a series of new inventions.
His thinking around the 80s and early 90s was onto something I think, even if he largery missed the mark when it came down to the details of his theory.
https://www.moillusions.com/bbc-experiment-optical-illusion/
He may have been wrong, but he was wrong in the right way.
"The Universe is a hologram: Stephen Hawking's final theory, explained by his closest collaborator"
> Smolin thinks our universe may itself be a product of a kind of evolution: maybe universes can replicate themselves via black holes, so over time — over a lot of time — you get universes whose physical laws are more and more conducive to replication.
from here: https://evolutionnews.org/2017/01/robert_wright_a/
A wikipedia article describes Smolin's "Cosmological natural selection" as an alternative to the anthropic principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection