Parity

Is Hawking objective?

Revisado: 10-15-06

For the most part I believe, from my lesser understanding of the subject matter, that Hawking has presented much of the scientific material fairly and quite well. However, when he strays off his field of excellence he betrays a bias, in this case the old clich? of the Catholic Church suppressing science. I will not address those arguments again here but suffice it to say that Hawking knows which side of the argument he is on and he is leading somewhere with it, as his "who needs God?" conclusion demonstrates.

As each opportunity to imply that the Church squashed free scientific enquiry presented itself (and was taken) I began to expect Hawking to omit the name of the person whose theory the Big-Bang was. This would have been particularly odd as Hawking had scrupulously acknowledged everything else. To not accredit a theory as core to his text as the Big-Bang would surely be unthinkable. And yet he did.

You see in the midst of all his "objective" writings and scrupulous acknowledgement of who came up with what Stephen Hawking omits to mention that the Big Bang theory was proposed in 1927 by a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaitre. His theory was not initially well received by such lumiaries as Einstein himself, who said "Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable." Six year's later Einstein effectively retracted that sentiment after listening to a Lemaitre presentation and said "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened." Meanwhile many in the scientific community still objected to the notion of a moment of creation.

To me this is interesting history and Hawking's conspicuous failure to accredit this theory or mention Einstein's reaction to it demonstrates a failure of objectivity that makes one question whether he would show the same bias towards pet theories in his science.

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