The Glade 4.0

Why does Stephen Hawking think science has overtaken philosophy?Stephen Hawking uses his new book, The Grand Design, to admonish philosophers for failing to keep up. My question is: is this really about keeping up? Hawking believes that since science has so far outstripped philosophy it is time for the thinkers to leave the field to the guys with the protractors and pocket calculators, but – another question – who let Stephen Hawking choose the rules of the game?

A quote from The West Wing comes to mind. Speechwriter Sam Seaborn argues that mankind should go to Mars because "it's next": "we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next."

What is so disturbing about Sam's vision is his effortless linkage of the opening of the west (the "manifest destiny" of the pioneers, an adventure fuelled by the religious rhetoric of the Methodist "Great Awakening") to human spirit and on to space travel.

Here, on a single flight-path, Sam connects religion, human nature and science. Life is a soaring vector, and that vector is "progress". This is the exact same notion of progress offered by Hawking. Of course, Hawking has no use for religion, but so evangelical about the notion of "progress" is he that it might as well be a religion.

How does Hawking define progress? Pretty much the same way it is defined in a quote attributed to Carlos "The Jackal": "You know you're getting somewhere when you're stepping over bodies." In Hawking's case, the bodies are those of philosophers, cast aside by science's relentless march.

To Hawking, vector is everything. Cosmology is about energy, as biology is about evolution, and Hawking demands that philosophy reflect this crazed restlessness. He criticises philosophers for failing to understand the maths that underpins his sciences, forgetting that it was a stream of philosophers who defined mathematics and, whether Zeno (in the fifth century BC) or Tarski (in the 20th century), also saw the multiple paradoxes that a reliance on numbers can lead to, as well as noting the theoretical impossibility of ever defining "number" from inside a mathematical framework. Why does Hawking love energy so much? Because, like Sam Seaborn and S Club 7, his idea of energy reflects a deeper wish to get moving and reach the stars. But he is also devoted to energy because this is simply how modern scientists look at things. Since Einstein, "energy equals matter" and Hawking lacks the imagination to think outside this box.

What does the universe look like to these men? A recent suggestion, emerging from work done on the Poincare Conjecture, is that the universe is an endlessly moving conveyor belt whose path might be modelled as a three dimensional coating on a four dimensional sphere. That's it. The universe is a slightly funky Möbius strip. All that time with their calculators and the best these guys come up with is something they first heard about in kindergarten!

If the universe is a four dimensional sphere, is this a metaphor? If so, is it possible that we need a new theory of metaphor? Hawking criticises philosophy for playing trivial word games and one sympathises: it must seem awfully trivial to a guy with no theoretical imagination. Or perhaps we should we go another way and allow that a four dimensional object is real. The question, then, is why should we prefer this object over, say, Leibniz's Monads? For Leibniz, a Monad is part of a fundamental multiplicity and each one, within its heart, carries all the information of the universe in a single, stable form.

There it is: an alternative view of matter that does not hinge on an undefined notion of "progress", from a man who could out-fox Isaac Newton on a good day and died three hundred years ago. Leibniz shows us why philosophy survives: because it is not stupid, though it may seem that way if one only glances at it, as one speeds past on a road to nowhere.

However there are just too many impressive examples in the history of science – from Galileo’s marvellous thought-experiment showing that Aristotle must have been wrong about falling bodies to a number of crucial quantum-related results – for anyone to argue convincingly that results obtained in the ‘laboratory of the mind’ can only impress philosophers keen to defend their patch. Indeed, there is a sense in which the scientific enterprise stands or falls on the validity of counterfactual-conditional reasoning, that is to say, reasoning from what necessarily would be the case should certain conditions obtain or certain hypotheses hold.