A plague of infinities

Stephen Hawking is the most distinguished living physicist, who despite the catastrophe of motor neurone disease has been twice married, is a bestselling author and a media super-star. He is blessed with an extraordinary intellectual energy and fearless resilience. One might also add chutzpah.

In The Grand Design he aims to give a concise and readable answer to the ‘Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.’ In fact he offers three such questions: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?’ It will come as no surprise to learn that he fails to provide a satisfactory solution to any of them. Had he succeeded, you would have already heard it on the news.

It should also come as no surprise to those who have followed the progress, or rather non-progress, of theoretical physics over the past few decades, that Hawking’s route to solving these mysteries should be chiefly concerned with GUTs and TOEs. These acronyms stand for ‘grand unified theories’ and ‘theories of everything’. They represent the Holy Grail for modern physicists, many of whom believe that a single, simple and elegant equation, such as Einstein’s E = mc², might one day be found to describe the physical behaviour of all particles and forces.

If this could be done, it would, of course, be very neat and wonderful, but the simple fact is that it can’t. Mathematics, in which physicists vest unwarranted confidence, is far too blunt a tool. It worked for Newton, Maxwell and Einstein because they found equations that accurately described the classical world. But with the discovery, in the early 20th century, of quantum mechanics, everything changed. Subatomic particles do not behave like large visible objects.