Mistakes in popular science in the media: Stephen Hawking didn’t discover everything

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking has been in the last decades a scientific icon for the media. His painful personal situation turned him into a celebrity who inevitably attracts attention. Therefore, the media have a tendency to exaggerate his scientific work, attributing to him achievements that weren’t his, which he would be the first to repudiate, if he were still among us.

For example, on the occasion of his death, the following headlines appeared in several media:

•         AlDiaNews.com: Stephen Hawking, author of the Big Bang theory dies at 76

•         ElTiempoHoy: Creador de la teoría del Big Bang y los agujeros negros: fallece Stephen Hawking a los 76 años. (Creator of Big Bang’s theory and black hole theory: Stephen Hawking dies at 76).

•         Gizmodo Univisión: Del Big Bang a la Teoría del Todo: el increíble legado científico de Stephen Hawking (From the Big Bang to the Theory of Everything: Stephen Hawking’s incredible legacy).

Is physics losing touch with reality?

In his famous posthumous book The Discarded Image, published in 1964, a few months after his death, C.S. Lewis shows he is ahead of his time by predicting a situation that today, when it has become usual in physics, gives a rather bad forecast for the future of this science. Let’s look at a relevant quote:

The mathematics are now the nearest to the reality we can get. Anything imaginable, even anything that can be manipulated by ordinary (that is, non-mathematical) conceptions, far from being a further truth to which mathematics were the avenue, is a mere analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable, modern physics speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as ‘making models’... Sometimes [the models] illustrate this or that aspect of [reality] by an analogy. Sometimes, they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the sayings of the mystics... By accepting [an expression such as] the ‘curvature of space’ we are not ‘knowing’ or enjoying ‘truth’ in the fashion that was once thought to be possible.

The theory of everything

In Joe Dacy’s science fiction novel Esquelle and the lost enclave (2015), which belongs to the hard science fiction genre, skillfully combined with espionage, adventure and political fiction, and covers 1500 years of future history, including the invention of time travel and the manipulation of the past, one can find the following quotation:

At this point, the Theory of Everything is actually the Theory of Not Very Much

Is Joe Dacy II right? Do we think we know a lot, but we know very little? What is this Theory of Everything, with such a grandiose name?

This name has been invented by a few physicists and cheered by the press, on the same line as the name of the God particle applied to the Higgs boson, possibly discovered in 2012. Yes, I say possibly, as it is not certain. Although the particle discovered had the predicted mass and decomposed in some of the predicted particles (not all of them), it has not yet been proved that the Higgs field exists.

What is meant by the name of Theory of Everything is that we know everything about the physical fundamentals of matter, that we do not need God.

The horizon effect

We are well aware of the horizon effect: as we walk towards the horizon, the horizon gets further away. In science sometimes this effect seems to apply. Let us look at a few examples:

Mycoplasma genitalium genetic map

• Synthetic biology: In 1960, producing living cells in the laboratory was predicted to be feasible by 1970. In 2015, Craig Venter (1) sees it feasible soon, perhaps by 2030. It is true that we have come very far, that great strides have been made, but the ultimate goal seems to be always at the same distance, or even a little further away. Moreover, the origin of life remains a mystery. The simplest being able to live independently (Mycoplasma genitalium) is very complicated, light-years away from the hypothetical first living being.

Why science can’t explain everything

The difficulty of explaining everything is not due to our mental weakness, but to the very structure of the universe. In recent centuries we have discovered that the fabric of the cosmos can be considered on several different levels. While the next level has not been discovered, what happens in the previous one cannot be explained, it can just be described. Consequently, for the last known level we can never have explanations, we can only have descriptions.

Let's look at a little history:

1. Eighteenth-century chemists discovered many new substances. Not knowing what they were, all they could do was describe them in catalogs of properties, but they had no explanation of those properties.