HAWKING: GOD NOT NEEDED FOR UNIVERSE TO BE CREATED

HAWKING: GOD NOT NEEDED FOR UNIVERSE TO BE CREATED

Posted in: Cosmology by Nancy Atkinson (20 Comments »)


Physicist Stephen Hawking has written a new book called "The Grand Design." While the title might seem like Hawking could be delving more into the “mind of God” that he alluded to in his earlier book, “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking actually says that the universe’s beginnings – or the "Big Bang" was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and that God wasn’t needed to “light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Co-authored with US physicist Leonard Mlodinow, in “The Grand Design” Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant. The Times of London newspaper published excerpts from the book today. The book goes on sale on Sept. 9.

The laws of gravity rather than the intervention of a divine being set the Universe in motion, Hawking wrote, and he contests Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have created out of chaos.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," Hawking wrote.

He said the first blow to Newton's contention was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he wrote.

For decades, Hawking has been at the forefront of looking for a ‘theory of everything,' and in “A Brief History of Time” he wrote, "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God."

Hawking, has a neuro-muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has left him almost completely paralyzed. He is only able to speak through a computer-generated voice synthesizer, and in the video above he discusses related issues with British biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins.

Read more reviews and commentary on the book at Cosmic Log, The Guardian, The Times of London (subscription required) and Reuters.

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http://www.universetoday.com/72605/hawking-god-not-needed-for-universe-to-be-created/

Are We Alone in This Universe?

Are We Alone in This Universe?



The Kepler telescope, which launches this week, will search for habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
(Courtesy NASA)


Telescope to Search for Habitable Planets That Have Water
By GINA SUNSERI
HOUSTON, March 5, 2009—


Are we alone in the universe or is there life out there waiting to be discovered?

NASA is getting ready to launch the Kepler telescope on an ambitious, first-of-its-kind mission: to search for Earth-size planets in our galaxy, orbiting stars at the right distances to have water on their surface.

These planets are too small and too difficult to be seen with past telescopes. But they are precisely the kinds of planets on which life could exist.

Kepler is NASA's $600 million telescope, scheduled to launch this week from the Kennedy Space Center. Its potential is enormous, according to astronomer Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University.

"What excites me is for the first time, we are going to have a mission that can take a full census of the kind of planets that exist around other stars," she said. Jon Morse, NASA's top astrophysicist, believes Kepler will revolutionize what we know about the universe.

"Kepler will push back the boundaries of the unknown in our patch of the Milky Way Galaxy," Morse told ABC News. "And its findings may fundamentally alter humanity's view of itself."

Kepler's telescope will work by detecting starlight, and analyzing minute changes in brightness in the galaxy while scanning space for planets like Earth. Kepler will trail Earth as it orbits the sun, on a mission that will last from three-and-a-half years, possibly going as long as six years.

During the mission, Kepler will measure changes in the brightness of more than 100,000 stars, every 30 minutes, searching for "winks" in light that happen when a planet passes in front of its star.

That is how Kepler will know when it has found another Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope, which has a different mission, can't do this.

"Hubble is really amazing for reviewing the structure of the universe [and] formation of galaxies," Fischer said.

"Hubble can't afford to do what Kepler is doing. Kepler has a smaller telescope and will stare at only one field, a large area of the sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra."



At Least Three Years to Find Another Earth
Fischer said that will take years.

"The hardest thing is going to be finding Earths around a star," she added. "If Kepler is flying for three years, an Earth in the habitable zone would take [a] year's orbit to spot, so it will take three transits in three years to detect another Earth.

Kepler may not find ET but it may find ET's home.


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