Exiting Ratusz-Arsenał Metro station by Aleja Solidarności yesterday, I came across this thought-provoking piece of street art featuring Prof Stephen Hawking (below), which has prompted me to write a blog post about it.
The quote, attributed to him, reads: Fundamentalna zasada rządząca wszechświatem: przyczyny występują przed skutkami, nigdy odwrotnie. ("The fundamental principle ruling the Universe: causes appear before the effects, not vice versa.")
Having done a bit of Googling, I can see this is a popular quote in Polish, though it's not one that appears in Hawking's own language, English. Googling further, the source of this quote is an article Hawking allegedly wrote for the Daily Mail, which was translated into Polish and appeared in the weekly Forum* in May 2010. Except - fishing out all the pieces by Hawking that appeared in the Daily Mail between 2009 and 2011, there's nothing remotely like this quote in any of them. I've scrolled through reams of Hawking quotes from various sources; again, this doesn't figure.
I suspect some creative journalist or 'translator' just made it up, using Hawking's name to lend respectability to the idea. In any case, Hawking's mind was way too sharp to line up cause and effect in such a simplistic manner. Time's arrow does indeed appear to use to fly in the direction of increasing entropy, but in a block universe, cause and effect could be simultaneous. String theory, 30 years old and neither proved nor disproved, suggests something similar. Some metaphysicists like Dean Radin or Rupert Sheldrake even posit that the mind can 'pull' effect out of a future, thus predating its cause.
The notion that causes appear before the effects and not vice versa is pure Newton; the classical physics of billiard balls and planets orbiting stars; "every action has an equal and opposite reaction". The discovery of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle - and gaping holes in our understanding of what led up to the Big Bang, or the nature of dark matter and dark energy, suggest that our understanding of the Universe isn't up to the task of linking cause and effect in such a simplistic way.
A brief acquaintance with retrocausality would disabuse the interested reader of the notion that cause must always precede effect, especially at the subatomic level. Feynman diagrams can run both ways, from left to right as well as right to left - implying a future that can take place before the past.
Even so, Hawking was definitely not a metaphysicist; for him, "heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark". (And yes, this is a pukka Hawking quote.) Yet today, an ever-growing body of scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is not merely an emergent phenomenon that evolved as neuronal activity in animals reached a critical mass, but a property fundamental to the Universe, manifesting itself to us in our minds, which are located for the duration of our biological lives in our brains. After which, the Return to Forever.
If you have ten minutes to spare, do watch this short interview with Prof Bernard Carr, mathematician and astronomer (who studied under Hawking at Cambridge, where he did his doctorate).
The notion that consciousness pervades the Universe, that there is something far deeper at work which our perceptions, wedded to realism on the human scale, have yet to fully fathom.
Reductionist-materialists often take pops at those whose worldview has room for the metaphysical and the supernatural with the same dogmatic zeal as the religious fundamentalists who state that the written word of God is All. The truth surely lies somewhere in between.
I am grateful, however, for 3fala.art for this mini-mural which at least raises some interesting questions.
* Forum appears every two weeks since 2013.
This time last year:
Viaduct at Węzeł Zamienie opens
Future, past
Birds return to the frozen ponds
Bending the forces of physics with your will
This time seven years ago:
Giving it up for Lent
This time nine years ago:
North-east of Warsaw West revisited
This time ten years ago:
Looking for answers
This time 11 years ago:
Fresh powder in Warsaw's parks
This time 13 years ago:
Another Lent starts
This time 15 years ago:
Okęcie dusk
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