The Curious Case of Stephen Hawking

Countless newspaper articles compare him to Einstein.
Numerous others remind us that he held the Lucasian Professorship at Cambridge, “formerly held by Isaac Newton”. In an episode in Star Trek, he appears on the spaceship’s holodeck playing cards with both Newton and Einstein – and wins.
Clearly, in the echelons of scientific achievement, Stephen Hawking is at the pinnacle, with the greatest of the great.

Or is he really?
Let’s do a little comparison.

Newton can safely be called the father of theoretical physics.
While scientists like Galileo and Kepler underscored the importance of experiments and observations to understand the world, Newton pioneered the use of mathematical modelling to explain observed phenomena and predict new ones.
His most famous achievement was formulating his laws of motion, and the inverse square law of gravity which explained both the fall of an apple and the orbit of the moon and planets with unprecedented accuracy.
In the process, he also invented Calculus – undoubtedly the most influential branch of mathematics we have seen in the last five centuries.
Newton’s book, Principia Mathematica, triggered a revolution in human thought, revealing the universe as amenable to human understanding through mathematical laws.

In 1905, Einstein unified Newtonian mechanics with Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism through his special theory of relativity, which made highly unintuitive, but completely correct predictions.
A decade later, he went even further, to create the general theory of relativity – a truly revolutionary theory that unified Newton’s law of gravity with special relativity by showing that gravity was the result of the curvature of space-time due to matter and energy.
General Relativity is one of the great pillars of modern physics, subsuming Newton’s laws of gravity and predicting a plethora of new phenomena – from black holes to the Big Bang.
Einstein also made very significant contributions to Quantum Mechanics, the other great pillar of modern physics. Most notably, he was the first to analyze light as a stream of particles rather than a wave.

Now for Stephen Hawking.
Fundamental areas of science established? None.
Influential new branches of math invented? None.
Any new fundamental particles predicted, as in the case of Paul Dirac? Nope.
How about a revolutionizing to an existing theory, like Richard Feynman? Not at all.
Don’t mean to rude or anything, but what has he done, then?

Two things, mainly.
In the late 1960’s, Roger Penrose proved a theorem to the effect that under certain conditions, general relativity predicts the occurrence of “singularities” – points in space where the laws of physics break down.
Hawking applied Penrose’s results to cosmological models, showing that under generic assumptions the point of origin of the Universe – the “moment of creation”, so to speak – is a singularity. Note that this is not a new theory, but a mathematical theorem derived from an existing theory (general relativity).

In 1974, Hawking proved the result which made him famous.
Using results from quantum field theory, he showed that black holes radiate energy and eventually evaporate. This created a huge stir, because black holes were by definition, objects from which nothing could escape, not even light. This was a strong indication that combining general relativity with quantum field theory could lead to unexpected results.
Hawking’s result has never been experimentally verified, but is accepted as true. Other scientists arrived at the same conclusion from a several different approaches, and the result explains a number of other theoretical issues in the field.

Impressive contributions? Certainly.
Worthy of a Nobel prize? Possibly.
Comparable to Newton and Einstein? Not by a very long run.
Then why is Hawking thus compared in the media? How has he gained a level of public prominence completely disproportionate to his actual achievements?
Why did his popular book, A Brief History of Time, top the New York Times bestseller list for three months straight, despite the fact that most readers claimed not to understand it?

Many think it is due to his physical condition which gets media attention– Hawking has been paralyzed by motor neuron disease since his early twenties.
In my opinion, the real answer lies elsewhere.

Grandiose Claims

Most great scientists are noted for their profound humility in the face of the universe.
The famous quote of Newton, comparing himself to a little boy playing on the shore of the ocean of knowledge comes to mind.
Now let’s hear Hawking:
“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

A simple goal indeed!! This is not an isolated statement.
In my view, audaciously grandiose claims like these play a key role in explaining Hawking’s arc to scientific superstardom.
While most popular science books are content to explore the wonders of the Universe and explain some of their workings, A Brief History of Time promises nothing less than an Ultimate Understanding – an answer to all the biggest questions ever asked my mankind.

In the book, Hawking claims that we are on the verge of a revolution in our understanding of the cosmos – not just any revolution, but the one to end them all.
We are on the verge of completing our quest to understand the ultimate laws of the universe, says Hawking. We will soon be in possession of a Theory of Everything – a grand unifying principle that subsumes all of physics and explains all features of the cosmos hitherto unknown, including the physical properties of all the fundamental particles, the forces and interactions between them and even the underlying structure of space and time.

What will follow thereafter is nothing short of intellectual Nirvana:
“If we do discover a complete theory.... we shall all be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”
A parenthetic claim – never directly made by Hawking, but widely inferred by the media and lay public – is that he would be the one to achieve this ultimate triumph of reason.



The grand vision promulgated by Hawking is, of course, vastly misleading.
Even if a unified theory of physics is found, its real applications will be primarily in esoteric realms far beyond the reach of experiment or observation, such the centres of black holes and the moment of the Big Bang. While this would certainly be impressive, the discussion of "why it is that we and the universe exist” has proceeded quite far without it.
Our current theories of physics, while incomplete and partial, have nevertheless been very successful in explaining how the world around us emerged from the blazing radiation of the Big Bang. Most areas of physics itself, let alone the other sciences, would not be impacted at all by the discovery of a “complete theory”.

Furthermore, Hawking’s own role in unifying physics has been minimal.
Currently, the most popular approach for unification is String Theory. If it succeeds in producing a Theory of Everything – a very big ‘If’ – the mantle of Einstein would pass to Edward Witten. Vastly respected within the theoretical physics community for his path-breaking contributions and insights, Dr. Witten is virtually unknown to the common man due to his preference for sticking to science rather than airing extravagant claims.

Hawking has never been at the forefront of the unification program, or even a significant contributor. But his starry eyed vision of the imminent arrival of the unified theory, his self declared goal of “complete understanding of the universe”, his constant references to God in his popular books and public lectures, has given the quest of unify physics an almost religious significance in the public psyche – with the Theory of Everything as God and Stephen Hawking as It’s soon-to-be prophet.

Unfortunately, scientific gurus, unlike religious ones, must test their claims against reality.
So how has Hawking fared?

The Rather Pathetic Design

It is now past 22 years since A Brief History of Time was written and over three decades since Hawking’s first public pronouncement that the end of physics was imminent.
The unified theory is nowhere in sight, and while string theorists keep ploughing on and claiming progress, their best efforts are yet to yield a single experimental prediction.

It is also becoming abundantly clear that even if a unified theory is eventually discovered, Stephen Hawking’s name will not figure on the credits list.
Hawking seems to be having trouble digesting this fact – his strategy is to alternate between suggesting that no unified theory is possible (sour grapes, anyone?) and declaring that it has already been found (no way).

His latest popular book, The Grand Design, is a good example of this.
He starts by saying that there may be no unified theory of physics, but just a bunch of “observer dependent theories”, whatever that means. The next moment, he is spinning on a dime to declare that “M-theory” is the unified theory.
Furthermore, apparently, M-theory predicts that the universe can spontaneously originate from absolute nothingness, so God is not necessary (once again God appears to help Hawking make headlines and sell copies).
So there! Dr. Hawking has Explained It All. Hip, hip, hooray!

Nobody is convinced.
Because M-theory makes no predictions. The reason being that nobody even knows what M-theory is.
Let me explain.

In 1995, Dr. Edward Witten whom we saw earlier, demonstrated the presence of a number of “dualities” between various versions of string theory – roughly speaking, a difficult problem in one version could be translated into an easy one in another version.
This led to the hope that all the string theories were special aspects of a greater theory subsuming them all, which was termed “M-theory”.
In Witten’s own words: “The M stands for magic, mystery or matrix according to taste”.
Thus M-theory is a hypothetical theory which may exist – not an existing theory with concrete predictions.

Similarly, the spontaneous origin of the universe is not a prediction of any theory we have – it is merely speculated that a unified theory of physics which merges general relativity and quantum mechanics might allow something like this to happen.
The “grand design” revealed by Hawking is, thus, misleading on many levels.
Much like religious gurus who refuse to admit a mistake, Hawking attempts to “explain it all” through obfuscation and incorrect statements.

So, where does this leave us?
In my view, with a lesson that we keep forgetting despite endless reminders.
We humans are very small creatures in an incredibly vast Universe and our attempts to unravel its mysteries work best when we work sincerely to answer small questions.
It is only by carefully knitting together the answers to those little questions that the big picture slowly emerges.
By contrast, whenever an individual pompously proclaims an “Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything”, it inevitably turns out to be incorrect or a meaningless 42.

Serious students and followers of science would do well to ignore the self-aggrandizing hype of Stephen Hawking, our media-made “Einstein”, and heed the words of the real one:
“Enough for me an inkling of the marvellous structure of Reality, the endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in Nature.”

AI Is Creeping Up On You

In movies, Artificial Intelligence, aka AI, always arrives with a bang.
The machines wake up, realize their power and immediately launch a nuclear holocaust or trap us in the Matrix or something similarly unpleasant. I strongly suspect this will never happen. Instead, as the decades go by, we will increasingly be surrounded by AI at many levels – while vigorously insisting all through that it’s “no big deal”.

A milestone for artificial intelligence was achieved last week in a three-day Jeopardy contest held from February 14 – 16. For those unfamiliar with Jeopardy, it is a version of our beloved Quiz contests, with some differences.
For one, the clues are often presented in deliberately convoluted language, often with more than one meaning. As a further twist, the quizmaster presents the question as an “answer”, and the contestant must present the answer as a “question”.
For instance, rather than asking “Who wrote Hamlet and Macbeth?” the host will say, “This is the author of Hamlet and Macbeth” and the contestant will answer “Who is Shakespeare?”
Rather than the straightforward scoring system of quizzes, each clue comes with a “dollar value”, which is added or deducted to the contestant’s total depending on their answer.
There are also several “Daily Double” clues, where the contestant can wager a sum of money all the way up to their total “earnings” till that point.
The score of the contestant is the total amount of “money accumulated”.

The tournament last week featured two superstars of the Jeopardy world – Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on the show, and Ken Jennings, record holder for the longest championship streak.

But the spotlight was on the non-human entrant, Watson – a supercomputer designed by IBM running natural language processing software.
The clues were sent to Watson as a text message at exactly the same time they were made visible to the other contestants. Watson would have to unravel the language in the clue, find the answer, and press the buzzer before the other contestants did to have a chance at scoring.

The first day of the match on Feb 14 ended with Watson and Rutter tied at $5000 with Jennings trailing at $2000. The internet was abuzz with theories about how the champions were merely “warming up” before trouncing the machine over the next two days.
All such speculations were crushed on Day Two, which ended with Jennings at $4,800, Rutter at $10,400… and Watson massively ahead with $35,734 !
The final day ended with Jennings at $24,000, Rutter at $21,600 and Watson at $77,147 – a thoroughly convincing victory.
The answer to “Jeopardy world champion” is now “Who is Watson?”

Apart from the immense entertainment, a pleasant aspect of the program was the graceful acceptance of defeat by the humans. The affable Ken Jennings even quipped, “I, for one, welcome our computer overlords.”

This was a marked contrast to the acrimonious ending of a similar Man vs. Machine event fourteen years earlier, when IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a 6 game match played in 1997.
Kasparov proved to be a very poor loser – storming away after the last game, being conspicuously absent at the prize distribution ceremony and accusing the IBM team of cheating.
IBM retaliated by refusing a re-match and decommissioning Deep Blue.
The whole episode remains mired in controversy and bad feeling.

Computer chess advanced considerably over the next decade.
In November 2006, the reigning world champion Vladimir Kramnik played Deep Fritz.
In contrast to Deep Blue which was specially designed software running on a customized supercomputer, Fritz was a commercially available program running on a high-end laptop.
Nevertheless, the computer won the 6 game match with 2 wins and 4 draws.

Since then, interest in human-computer chess matches has waned. Though not proved by actual play, it is quietly acknowledged that today’s best chess programs like Rybka running on a supercomputer would trounce any human chess player.

Lame Excuses
What amuses me about both the Watson and Deep Blue incidents is the subsequent proliferation of excuses from the human side for why these incidents were “nothing special” and “not really artificial intelligence”. The excuses fall into roughly four categories, which I list below in decreasing order of silliness, along with my responses.

Excuse 1: “Deep Blue and Watson were both supercomputers with top end hardware. So it’s no big deal that they could do what they did”
Response: And your point is? I can similarly imagine a rabbit saying, “It’s no big deal that humans are so intelligent, given their big brains and all.”
The power of the hardware is part of what makes the system impressive. I agree that Watson wouldn’t have won if it was running on a laptop, but I can bet you that Jennings wouldn’t do too well after a frontal lobotomy either.
Also note how quickly we jump from “A computer can never do X” to “It’s no big deal that a computer can do X”!!

Excuse 2: “The computer isn’t really thinking. It is only doing what its program tells it to do”
Response: This is in strong competition for the silliness top spot.
If a human had beaten the world chess champion, would you have agreed that he or she was thinking?
Conversely, why not argue that when Kasparov plays “he isn’t really thinking. He is only doing what the firing of neurons in his brain tells him to do”?

Excuse 3: “The computer has no credit in this. The credit belongs entirely to the humans who programmed it”
Response: No wait, it’s not the credit of the programmers at all, but of the genes and environment that shaped their brains. No wait, actually all credit is due to the process of evolution which shaped those genes. No wait…
See how this goes?
My point is, if we follow any consistent standard for giving credit, we should certainly congratulate the programmers who for designing Watson or Deep Blue, but after that we must credit the systems for their subsequent performance.

Excuse 4: “Computers may be able to play chess and win Jeopardy, but they cannot invent new technology or compose music or *fill in the blanks*”
Response: The sentence above is missing a “Yet” at the end.

One must remember that the first ‘computers’ in society were not machines, but a group of people, mostly women, working in science laboratories. They were so called because of their ability to perform complex arithmetic accurately and repeatedly – an ability much valued and taken to indicate great mental stamina.
Fifty years ago, anyone would have agreed that playing chess well required intelligence, and a high degree of intelligence, at that.
Talking computers which understand language have traditionally been science-fiction territory – a hallmark of intelligent machines and droids of the far future.

But every time real computers reach one of these milestones, the significance of the event is denied and the bar of “true intelligence” reset several notches higher.
The current list of “what computers can never do” includes “appreciating poetry” and “falling in love”. True, perhaps, but the question is, do they need to?
The goal of AI is not to create artificial humans, any more than the goal of aircraft designers is to create a machine which flaps its wings and lays eggs.

I personally believe that Artificial Intelligence will not take the form of an all-encompassing, godlike Supermind, so beloved of science fiction authors and fans.
Instead, as the centuries roll on, we will see a proliferation of specialized applications tailored to specific tasks, that we would definitely call intelligent, but our descendants may not.
Ultimately, the only remaining special feature of human intelligence may be the ability to invent excuses for why we are special!

Male and Female

We are all half-human. Think about it.

Imagine an alien zoologist who abducts one of us to conduct a biological study of the human species. However judiciously chosen, the sample will lack one major organ system and some attendant secondary characteristics. Furthermore, our inquisitive alien will be at a loss trying to figure out how the species propagates.

Much ado about little has been made in human society over the “inexorable differences between male and female” – from different dressing conventions to different expectations about career and lifestyle.
In fact, some philosophers have gone so far as to explain the entire Universe as the interaction of “male and female principles” – Shiva and Shakti, Yin and Yang.This is, of course, one of the many examples where over-extrapolating from the human condition leads to complete nonsense. The “principles” governing the Universe are impersonal mathematical laws which know nothing of male, female or transgender.

All right then, what about the biosphere?
Aren’t male-female distinctions fundamental to the living world? Hardly.

Let’s start at the very beginning – with microorganisms.
In case that’s too humble a beginning for you, consider the fact that at least 50% of the Earth’s biomass consists of bacteria alone, and for 85% of its history, life on Earth was nothing but microorganisms.
There are no genders in the unicellular world.
Virtually all microorganisms reproduce asexually – splitting into clones which mutate slowly over the ages. Among bacteria, a pair of creatures will sometimes come together to exchange genetic material, but this is not connected to reproduction.

Still too microscopic for you? Then let’s consider the green world of autotrophs.
Plants are the basis of the biosphere, converting the energy of sunlight into useful forms which all other creatures can process.
An alien botanist would face none of the “incomplete sample” problems plaguing our hapless zoologist. The vast majority of plant species are hermaphrodites – a single sample gives you the entire picture. The situation is worth a deeper look.

Each plant has many reproductive organs. We call them flowers.
In the vast majority of cases, each flower has both male and female parts – an androecium that produces pollen, and a gynaecium that contains ova. In botanist’s jargon, these are “complete flowers”.
These include roses, lilies and the hibiscus, much beloved of authors of sixth-grade biology texts. In fact, virtually all the bright and colourful flowers that gardeners cherish are complete flowers, and the corresponding plants are called “hermaphrodite”.

Now some plants produce flowers that only make pollen or only have ova – male and female flowers so to speak. But each plant has both male and female flowers.
Only a paltry 6% or so of plant species have exclusively male or female plants, with flowers of only one type. These tend to be rather small and unattractive, usually pollinated by wind.
Clearly, plants think gender is a bad idea.

So, how about things that move? If you take a walk in your garden, the earthworms and snails you come across are all hermaphrodites. During mating time, two individuals will line up and simultaneously fertilize each other!
Looking for something less slimy? Take a cruise down to the Great Barrier Reef. Among the colourful corals and sea anemones, you will see schools of bright orange and white fish, which may remind you of the movie Finding Nemo.
These are clownfish, and their gender behaviour is most interesting. Each school consists of many males and one dominant female. But if the female dies or goes missing, one of the males changes sex to become female. How extremely convenient!
In fact, clownfish will sometimes pair up and inhabit a sea anemone. If the pair consists of two males, no problem at all. One of them just “changes over” and all is well.

Such sex change behaviour, where males become females or vice versa in response to the gender ratio in the population is in fact quite common among fish in the coral reefs and several species of amphibians as well (some of you may recall that this was a plot element in Jurassic Park). Imagine the wonders such a system would work in your average engineering college.

So then, what happened to us?
Why are we stuck with the most boring of alternatives, where each individual is doomed from birth to see only “one half of life”, as it were, with much inane speculation about what the other half “really wants”? Why aren’t we hermaphroditic “complete individuals” like the plants, or conveniently mutable like the clownfish?
Turns out, this is quite a puzzle.

The only major classes of animal where all individuals are exclusively male or female are reptiles, birds and mammals (and dinosaurs too, from fossil evidence, but then birds are just living dinosaurs.) But they are produced rather differently in each case.
If you think male versus female is a matter of different versus similar sex chromosomes (XY vs XX) think again. That’s only for mammals.
Among reptiles, the sex of the individual depends on various external factors like the temperature at which the egg was incubated. For birds, it’s the males that have the same sex chromosomes (ZZ, as opposed to ZW for females).
And even for humans, chromosomes aren’t destiny. It turns out that in addition to XY chromosomes, you need functioning testosterone receptors in the foetus, otherwise it just develops into a female.
Nature has to work quite hard to produce separate-sex individuals, apparently.

But why? What’s wrong with good old hermaphrodites?
The possible diversity in the gene pool is reduced to half in every generation, thanks to the exclusive single-sex system, so what are the compensating features for evolution?
Is some kind of fitness parameter being optimized by having separate males and females?
Or is it just a “frozen accident” of biological history – the common ancestor of mammals, birds and reptiles had males and females, so that’s how it remained?

The answers lie hidden somewhere in the genetic code. But for now, we half-humans can only wonder and our alien zoologist needs a sample of at least two....