BOOKMARKED: The Answer To Everything There Is To Know
A review on Stephen Hawking’s instructive and hopeful Brief Answers to the Big Questions
Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking is a compilation of humanity’s greatest curiosities delineated in a comprehensive and scientifically rooted manner. With his admiration towards the world’s complexities and endless possibilities, Hawking presents both in-depth and general answers that provide his readers with an equal amount of satisfaction and even more questions from when they started his book.
Before you quickly stereotype Brief Answers as a nerdy snore-fest, I want to share how it provided me with more clarity — much like a eureka moment — to my personal biggest questions than I had anticipated. These said curiosities of mine concern the existence of God, the future of artificial intelligence, and man’s colonization of space. Brief Questions is not limited to Hawking’s field of study (General Relativity and Quantum Gravity) and examines the interdisciplinary themes of philosophy, technology, climate change, politics, and the like.
The wisdom that Hawking imparts in Brief Answers reflects everyday matters we encounter, one even as simple as hearing mass. My family and I were listening to a priest’s homily one Sunday, and he says something along the lines of “God will not give you a challenge you cannot take.” I remember wondering why humans feel the need to connect unpredictable occurrences in life to parochial beliefs. Hawking states, “People will always cling to religion because it gives them comfort.” He argues that it is simply an early attempt to answer the questions we did not have the answers to yet. A couple of days ago, I watched a movie called The Invention of Lying, which is essentially a slightly (or extremely) agnostic allegory on how religion may have birthed the concept of lying — all to calm man’s fear of the unknown. The thought of infinite unconsciousness and nothingness can indeed be unsettling for some, yet the possibility of ascending into a paradise, surrounded by other supposedly righteous individuals, can somewhat be comforting.
“The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws — laws that can be understood by the human mind,” Hawking argues that if there is indeed a God, then he must be a passive one. These said laws, he says, may or may not have been decreed by God himself, but he has no freedom and power over them at this point because with every random occurrence, there lies an underlying order — as presented by the chaos theory. To simply put it, everything in the world has a cause — from the extinction of dinosaurs to global pandemics — and is thus an effect of that cause. If that is the case, what role is there for a God at all? I would like to think that the concept of a God is beyond a supernatural and superhuman being. According to Hawking, God can be defined as “the embodiment of the laws of nature,” and I think that is beautiful.
Shortly after I finished reading this book, I came across Mitchells Versus The Machines on Netflix. It is a movie about a machine uprising — a point in the continuous technological innovation where artificial intelligence acquires consciousness and personal autonomy separate from humans. This is not the first time that the “machines taking over the human race” logline has been explored as we already have Transcendance, Wall-E, Alita: Battle Angel, and many more. Mitchells Versus The Machines and other similar movies remind me a lot about Hawking’s take on whether AI or robots will eventually take over humans and their superior position on Earth. Animals are inferior to humans because they are dependent on them, so what is stopping technology from becoming superior to humans, given that the latter already depends on them?
“Machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, in what science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge called a technological singularity,” mathematician Irving Good realized in 1965. Similarly, Hawking argues that while AI can open up advances in every area of science and society, it is also equally capable of providing incalculable contributions that may be harmful in the long run. “As a growing number of areas in our daily lives are increasingly affected by robots, we need to ensure that robots are, and will remain, in the service of humans,” he adds.
I read an article from BBC that the Apollo missions have left human waste on the moon. I have also learned from a NASA documentary that space debris from space crafts permeates beyond our atmosphere. Somehow, these made me quite against the idea of mankind eventually colonizing other planets because we have enough problems here anyway. However, Hawking argues that while exploring the space beyond Earth will not solve any of our immediate problems, it will give our generation and those to come a new perspective on what is beyond us and influence us to look outwards instead of inwards. “We must look outwards to the wider universe, while also striving to fix problems on Earth,” he adds.
Brief Answers to The Big Questions embodies Hawking’s advocacy of familiarizing people, especially the younger generation, to scientific subjects, no matter what profession they intend to pursue. I appreciate that it follows a thematic cadence, similar to A Brief History of Time. It allows non-specialist readers like myself to gain a fragmental understanding of specific topics, which makes it easier to comprehend their connection with one another.
In one of the chapters, Hawking explains that there is no way to accurately measure both the position and speed of a particle because the more accurately you try to measure one aspect, the less accurately you can know the other. Since particles do not have well-defined positions, they are represented by a so-called wave function; the probability that a particle will be found in certain positions. I see this principle somewhat comparable to the manner Hawking discusses every topic in the book — complex and deep within the gray area. Still, he finds a way to also simplify them as impossible as it may be.
“Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions. And Hawking’s questions themselves keep on giving, generating breakthroughs decades later,” Professor Kip Thorne writes in his introduction. So, if you read Brief Answers and come out even more curious than you were before, do not be disgruntled because you are on the right track. After all, questions breed wisdom.
