Response to Hawking

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This is a response to an argument Stephen Hawking puts forth in the chapter "The Arrow of Time" in his book A Brief History of Time. In it I'm showing that one of his propositions, when taken to its logical conclusion (which he suspiciously neglects to do) undermines his argument vis-a-vis cosmological time (which he subsequently buttresses the remaining part of the chapter on).

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1. According to Stephen Hawking, there are three "arrows of time."
2. These arrows he calls the thermodynamic, psychological, and cosmological.
3. The thermodynamic arrow points in the direction of entropy.
4. The psychological arrow points in the direction of memory.
5. The cosmological arrow points in the direction of the expansion of the Universe.
6. Hawking states the psychological arrow is dependent on the thermodynamic arrow, that is, the direction we perceive as being forward in time is the direction in which entropy (or disorder) increases.
7. Hawking posits that God could have made the Universe in such a way that order increases (he later discards this proposition, but let's take it to its logical conclusion).
8. If this were true, since the psychological arrow is predicated on the thermodynamic arrow, we would perceive the Universe as operating in the opposite direction as what it is actually operating. (That is, even though the Universe would be contracting, we would perceive it as expanding.)
9. Because we would perceive the Universe as expanding whether or not it was actually expanding, Hawking's cosmological arrow does not, in fact, state anything whatsoever.

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@hammersklavier,

hammersklavier wrote:

This is a response to an argument Stephen Hawking puts forth in the chapter "The Arrow of Time" in his book A Brief History of Time. In it I'm showing that one of his propositions, when taken to its logical conclusion (which he suspiciously neglects to do) undermines his argument vis-a-vis cosmological time (which he subsequently buttresses the remaining part of the chapter on).

It's just a pop science book. :a-ok:

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@hammersklavier,

Interesting read;
The Hawking of Stephen Hawking:
Celebrity, Cosmology, Disability

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@hammersklavier,

It's also a textbook in my IH 2 class, thank yew vewwy much.

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@hammersklavier,

hammersklavier wrote:

It's also a textbook in my IH 2 class, thank yew vewwy much.

Really?!? Eeek! :eek:

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@Bones-O,

Bones-O! wrote:

Really?!? Eeek! :eek:

IH 2=Intellectual Heritage 2 (for some odd reason, campus calls it Mosaic nowadays and got rid of the WI Core :nonooo:)...

So are Jenner's Vaccination Against Smallpox, the Iliad, Utopia, Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, something by MLK, and I think probably something else I forgot about...Germinal!

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@hammersklavier,

Well, I'm not sure exactly what Hawking was trying to get at either. The singularity of the big bang is the most ordered possible state of the universe. Therefore it makes little sense to have anti-parallel cosmological and entropical time arrows.
Disorder increases because the universe is expanding, and we see time evolving in the direction it does because that's the direction of disorder increase.

I suppose what could occur is an antiparallelism between entropical and psychological time arrows. Our brains have to order themselves at the expense of more disorder in themselves and the universe as a whole. However, such a creature could not evolve since evolution itself is a disordering process. God could make one, though... if He exists.

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@Bones-O,

Exactly! As I have mulled over the book, I have realized that the only way Hawking doesn't contradict himself is by eliminating the Western idea of God, that He is extrauniversal, acting ex mundi. Hawking, though himself an atheist, takes great pains to maintain that QM allows quite a large place for God, but for Hawking's theory to make any sense, we have to (ironically enough) totally deny this concept of God, because with God in the picture, there is no real reason that the cosmological time arrow is oriented the way it seems, and if there were such a God, it seems most reasonable that it would be His will the universe would proceed from the most disordered to the most ordered possible state; since human memory and perception of time is bound up with entropy, we would be traveling backwards in cosmic time and never be able to know it.

Intriguing.

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@hammersklavier,

hammersklavier wrote:

Exactly! As I have mulled over the book, I have realized that the only way Hawking doesn't contradict himself is by eliminating the Western idea of God, that He is extrauniversal, acting ex mundi. Hawking, though himself an atheist, takes great pains to maintain that QM allows quite a large place for God, but for Hawking's theory to make any sense, we have to (ironically enough) totally deny this concept of God, because with God in the picture, there is no real reason that the cosmological time arrow is oriented the way it seems, and if there were such a God, it seems most reasonable that it would be His will the universe would proceed from the most disordered to the most ordered possible state; since human memory and perception of time is bound up with entropy, we would be traveling backwards in cosmic time and never be able to know it.

Intriguing.

Well, like I said, the notion is absurd for other reasons, which suggests Hawking is allowing for paradox here, so perhaps in suggesting an ordering universe, he is breaking the relation between entropical time and psychological time, thus allowing an antiparallelism to emerge between them. I would certainly be surprised if the man responsible for some of the biggest acheivements in the theoretical physics of black holes and the big bang believed that the arrow of cosmological time was truly special. This is why I made my first post. The 'arrow of time' is a pop-sci concept. Most of Brief History is dedicated to ideas that were highly saleable to the public, and most of the rest is presented in a simplified and so misleading way.

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