On April 6 the Italian newspaper La Repubblica ran a piece about Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s recent book, The Grand Design. The article’s subtitle was taken from a passage in the book that says that “philosophy is dead”. The passage continues, “Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”. The death of philosophy has been announced many times before, and this was no cause for alarm. Still, coming from a genius like Hawking, it seemed a rather foolish thing to say. To be sure that La Repubblica hadn’t misquoted him, I went out and bought the book, and on reading it my suspicions were confirmed.
The book’s byline indicates that it was written by two authors. But in Hawking’s case the word “by” is painfully metaphorical, because his limbs do not respond to the commands of his exceptional brain — this is common knowledge. Hence the book is primarily the work of the second author, Mlodinow, whom the dust jacket describes as an excellent populariser and the writer of several episodes of Star Trek. (There is a hint of Star Trek in the beautiful illustrations inside the book, which look as though they were conceived for a children’s encyclopaedia in a bygone era: They are colourful and fascinating, but they explain absolutely nothing about the complex physical-mathematical-cosmological theories they ought to illustrate.) Perhaps it wasn’t prudent to entrust philosophy’s destiny to characters in a science-fiction series.
The Grand Design begins with the peremptory statement that philosophy no longer has anything to teach us, and that only physics can explain: (1) how to understand the world around us; (2) the nature of reality; (3) whether the universe needs a creator; (4) why there is something rather than nothing; (5) why we exist; and (6) why this particular set of laws exists, and not a different one. These are typical questions in philosophy, but the book shows how, in a way, physics can answer the last four questions, which seem the most philosophical of all.
The only catch is that before you can attempt to answer the last four questions, you need to have answers to the first two. In other words, what does it mean to say that something is real and that we know the world exactly as it is? You may recall questions like these from a high school or college philosophy course: Do we know because the mind adapts to the thing? Is there something outside ourselves, or, as the Harvard philosophy professor, Hilary Putnam, put it, are we brains in a vat?
Well, the fundamental answers that this book offers are typically philosophical, and if these philosophical answers didn’t exist, then even a physicist wouldn’t be able to say what he knows, or why. In fact, Hawking and Mlodinow talk about model-dependent realism; in other words, they assume that there is no concept of reality independent of descriptions and theories. So different theories can describe the same phenomenon in a satisfactory way through disparate conceptual structures; consequently, all we can perceive, know and say about reality depends on the interaction between our models and the “something” that exists outside of ourselves, which is known to us thanks only to our perceptual organs and our brains.
More suspicious readers may have even spotted the ghost of Immanuel Kant in the book’s argument. Certainly the authors are proposing what is known to some philosophers as “holism” and to others as “internal realism”. It is not a matter of physical discoveries but of philosophical assumptions, which support and legitimise the physicist’s research. And if physicists are good at their job, they cannot avoid posing the problem of the philosophical foundations of their own methods. This is something we already knew, just as we were already familiar with the book’s revelation (evidently the work of Mlodinow and the crew of the starship “Enterprise”) that in ancient times people instinctively attributed violent natural disasters to an Olympus populated by malicious divinities. Good heavens and by Jove.
Umberto Eco’s most recent book is On Ugliness. He is also the author of international bestsellers Baudolino, The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, among others
By arrangement with the New York Times
