Page 91 - A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking... Chapter 11
basic than the quarks and electrons that we now regard as “elementary” particles.

However, it seems that gravity may provide a limit to this sequence of “boxes within boxes.” If one had a
particle with an energy above what is called the Planck energy, ten million million million GeV (1 followed by
nineteen zeros), its mass would be so concentrated that it would cut itself off from the rest of the universe and
form a little black hole. Thus it does seem that the sequence of more and more refined theories should have
some limit as we go to higher and higher energies, so that there should be some ultimate theory of the
universe. Of course, the Planck energy is a very long way from the energies of around a hundred GeV, which
are the most that we can produce in the laboratory at the present time. We shall not bridge that gap with
particle accelerators in the foreseeable future! The very early stages of the universe, however, are an arena
where such energies must have occurred. I think that there is a good chance that the study of the early
universe and the requirements of mathematical consistency will lead us to a complete unified theory within the
lifetime of some of us who are around today, always presuming we don’t blow ourselves up first.

What would it mean if we actually did discover the ultimate theory of the universe? As was explained in Chapter
1, we could never be quite sure that we had indeed found the correct theory, since theories can’t be proved.
But if the theory was mathematically consistent and always gave predictions that agreed with observations, we
could be reasonably confident that it was the right one. It would bring to an end a long and glorious chapter in
the history of humanity’s intellectual struggle to understand the universe. But it would also revolutionize the
ordinary person’s understanding of the laws that govern the universe. In Newton’s time it was possible for an
educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then, the pace
of the development of science has made this impossible. Because theories are always being changed to
account for new observations, they are never properly digested or simplified so that ordinary people can
understand them. You have to be a specialist, and even then you can only hope to have a proper grasp of a
small proportion of the scientific theories. Further, the rate of progress is so rapid that what one learns at school
or university is always a bit out of date. Only a few people can keep up with the rapidly advancing frontier of
knowledge, and they have to devote their whole time to it and specialize in a small area. The rest of the
population has little idea of the advances that are being made or the excitement they are generating. Seventy
years ago, if Eddington is to be believed, only two people understood the general theory of relativity. Nowadays
tens of thousands of university graduates do, and many millions of people are at least familiar with the idea. If a
complete unified theory was discovered, it would only be a matter of time before it was digested and simplified
in the same way and taught in schools, at least in outline. We would then all be able to have some
understanding of the laws that govern the universe and are responsible for our existence.

Even if we do discover a complete unified theory, it would not mean that we would be able to predict events in
general, for two reasons. The first is the limitation that the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics sets on
our powers of prediction. There is nothing we can do to get around that. In practice, however, this first limitation
is less restrictive than the second one. It arises from the fact that we could not solve the equations of the theory
exactly, except in very simple situations. (We cannot even solve exactly for the motion of three bodies in
Newton’s theory of gravity, and the difficulty increases with the number of bodies and the complexity of the
theory.) We already know the laws that govern the behavior of matter under all but the most extreme
conditions. In particular, we know the basic laws that underlie all of chemistry and biology. Yet we have
certainly not reduced these subjects to the status of solved problems: we have, as yet, had little success in
predicting human behavior from mathematical equations! So even if we do find a complete set of basic laws,
there will still be in the years ahead the intellectually challenging task of developing better approximation
methods, so that we can make useful predictions of the probable outcomes in complicated and realistic
situations. A complete, consistent, unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of
the events around us, and of our own existence.

PREVIOUS NEXT

file:///C|/WINDOWS/Desktop/blahh/Stephen Hawking - A brief history of time/j.html (10 of 11) [2/20/2001 3:15:56 AM]