Revisiting Books Long Since Read 8 - Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (Viking, 1992). Dr. John Gribbin and Dr Michael White.  

Two physicist friends and former graduate students, Dr. Michael White and Dr. John Gribbin wrote a wonderful biography of Stephen Hawking simply called Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (Viking, 1992).  Therein we are introduced to this wonderful mind, prisoner of a most disobedient body.  A physicist, out and out, is Hawking.  Not for him the rather tame answers of theologians and believers.  Not for him the cloudy thinking of metaphysicians either.  He has absolutely no time for the likes of Jung, to whose great work and marvellous personality I am very attracted, and certainly no time at all for Jung’s theory of synchronicity which I have written much about elsewhere.  White and Gribbin allude to the serendipitous fact that 8 January 1942 was both the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of one of history’s greatest intellectual figures, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, and the day Stephen William Hawking was born into a world torn apart by war and global strife.  They go on significantly to point out that Hawking would typically reply to this coincidence that “around two hundred thousand other babies were born on that day, so maybe it is after all not such an amazing coincidence.” (p 5) Nothing like a pure scientist’s sharp intellect to take the wind out of a romantic’s sails or the shine off a creative writer’s verbosity.

Stephen Hawking’s writings are brilliant.  I learned from this biography cum introduction that like Dawkins he has no time for much apart from his physics.  Consequently, he is not really too concerned with metaphysics or psychology or soul work and indeed has very little or no time for philosophy.  Theology would obviously be simply anathema.  That does not reduce him in my eyes.  His outlook on the world could be termed as stoic in that traditional sense.  He blames no one, and certainly not God as he is an atheist, for his severe medical condition.  Rather, he sees life as a mere question of luck, how the atoms and molecules or life substances evolve and collide.  We are, after all, to quote the great Bertrand Russell mere “collocations of atoms.”  However, for anyone interested in the big questions Hawking is worth wrestling with as is Bertrand Russell.

Hawking sees life as a question of luck and maintains that each of us should quit complaining and make the best of the "hand of cards" we have been dealt.  Despite being severely handicapped by ALS (or Motor Neuron or Lou Gehrig's disease) he has a stoical attitude to life (in fact, Stephen is a gentle type of atheist, I feel): Here he explains his philosophy of life in his own words:

“I think I'm happier now than I was before I started.  Before the illness set in I was bored with life.  I drank a fair amount, I guess, and didn't do any work.  It was really a rather pointless existence.  When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything that one does have. (Quoted page 192).  And later his biographers report his saying: “...One has to be grown up enough to realize that life is not fair.  You just have to do the best you can in the situation you are in.”  (p. 293) These are truly stoical, almost spiritual sentiments.

On the other side of the debate, I am singularly put off by the dogmatism of the fundamentalists in all religions who have easy answers to all the big questions.  I simply cannot stand the self-righteousness of any of the Creationists.  I am doubly annoyed at the fundamentalism of the Bible Belt Americans who support the blind “gung ho” policies of the oil-man former president George W. Bush.  Easy answers to big questions bring much suffering in their wake.  As I have mentioned in other posts fundamentalism in science I also eschew because it is simply as bad as fundamentalism in religion.  It reduces the questions to either science or mathematics and leaves no room for mystery, creativity, genius, aesthetics, spirituality, moderate and open religion, morality or ethics. An old school teacher who taught me many years ago had a lovely phrase or proverb which went, “Always be suspicious of the man who has only read one book.”  On further checking the provenance of this saying I have learnt that it was first expressed by St Thomas Aquinas in Latin, way back in the thirteenth century.

This is where the philosophy of a good sound liberal education comes in.  We must educate our children in all the ways of human culture, both yesterday and today, in the liberal arts, in the sciences, in the human sciences, in sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, theology – in the whole enterprise of all learning in all its various categories.  Obviously, they will only be able to study certain subjects in great detail as Renaissance men or women are long dead.  However, we must educate our youth to be open to all knowledge from all areas of human endeavour.  It’s too easy to dismiss the work and knowledge garnered therefrom in the field of the Liberal Arts or the Humanities.  We must instead learn humbly to call upon the epistemology of the likes of Socrates who declared his ignorance first before proceeding on his path to the discovery of the new.

Now back to the book in question. Hawking’s take on the chance-like nature of life has a startling similarity to the Buddhist view of suffering to my mind at least.  In general, we may say that there is also an amazing difference in attitude between the Eastern and Western approaches to suffering, and I'm speaking primarily of the man and woman in the street, not what philosophers think or write.  Most Westerners have higher expectations of life.  I've noticed a considerable change in this regard here in Ireland since the Celtic Tiger days - now we demand better and better medical care, and what's more, we want it immediately, now, this instant.  We also look at life almost "too positively," in the sense that we believe that the world is and should be a nice place to live in.  On the other hand, Easterners look at life in a more balanced, some would say even negative, way, realising that bad things as well as good things are part and parcel of life and are just as likely to happen.  We Westerners are more likely to say: "Why me?" "What did I do to deserve this pain or suffering?"  An Easterner would be less likely to ask these questions as s/he is so aware of the inevitability of suffering. They would more easily understand and perhaps be able to ask the questions: "Why not me? Am I any different to anyone else?" Strangely enough, it is the great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking who taught me this lesson some twenty years or more ago when I first read Gribbin’s and White’s biography.  It was as if Hawking had addressed me personally and said: “Life is unfair.  Accept it and get on with it!”  This agrees with what Dr Albert Ellis calls a rational belief. An irrational belief is one like saying "Life should be fair!" Ellis called his psychotherapeutic approach REBT (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy).  In this sense, objective science is very Eastern in tone, or Eastern belief is very scientific in tone.  Take your pick!  

Leaving all such personal beliefs and considerations aside, this is a good book for anyone looking for an insight into what makes a brilliant scientific mind.  And further, with a bit of luck, the reader may come away with a bit of good stoic philosophy and not a little wisdom. Buona Lettura, amici!!