Love and physics

Originally published 11 September 1989

It was an epic encounter.

Shirley MacLaine, tal­ent­ed actress-turned-New Age guru, pur­vey­or of inner bliss through the chan­nel­ing of cos­mic ener­gy, meets Stephen Hawk­ing, bril­liant the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist and math­e­mati­cian, whose body is total­ly dis­abled by motor neu­ron dis­ease. The meet­ing is described in MacLaine’s book Going With­in: A Guide for Inner Transformation.

After some chat­ty pre­lim­i­nar­ies, MacLaine asks if the har­mon­ic ener­gy of the uni­verse is “lov­ing.”

“I don’t know that there is any­thing lov­ing about ener­gy,” says the wheel­chair-bound pro­fes­sor, via his com­put­er­ized voice-syn­the­siz­er. “I don’t think lov­ing is a word I could ascribe to the universe.”

“What is a word you could use?” won­ders MacLaine.

“Order,” replies Hawk­ing. “The uni­verse is well-defined order.”

MacLaine per­sists, prac­tic­ing her best dialec­ti­cal meta­physics: “So the ques­tion becomes how we define order in rela­tion to how we see our­selves and our behavior?”

“Maybe,” replies Hawk­ing. “What do you mean?”

What do you mean, indeed. There is not much chance of a mean­ing­ful dia­logue in this encounter between lat­ter-day sooth­say­er and bemused sci­en­tist. MacLaine lives in a world of pen­ny mir­a­cles; she makes the sun shine by focus­ing lov­ing ener­gy to burn away the clouds. Chants, crys­tals, chakras, chan­nel­ers, and clair­voy­ants: These are the instru­ments of her dreamy con­ju­ra­tions. Hawk­ing, on the oth­er hand, mod­est­ly admits to only one great mir­a­cle, the uni­verse itself, and even that may be some­thing less than mirac­u­lous. His med­i­ta­tions are mathematical.

The public is listening

What the viva­cious guru and the pro­fes­sor have in com­mon is they both sell lots of books. Hawk­ing’s sur­vey of mod­ern physics, A Brief His­to­ry of Time, enjoys phe­nom­e­nal suc­cess (72 weeks on the best­seller list), out­shin­ing even MacLaine’s dishy recipes for Inner Trans­for­ma­tion. Appar­ent­ly, both authors have some­thing to say that the pub­lic wants to hear.

They assert the same goal — to know how the uni­verse works and the role we play in it. As her title sug­gests, MacLaine goes inside in her search for answers, prob­ing for some­thing she calls her High­er Self. Pro­fes­sor Hawk­ing might have called his book “Going Out­side.” His sub­jects range from sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles to galax­ies, and he seems gen­uine­ly reluc­tant to talk about him­self, except to count him­self lucky.

Hawk­ing lists three pos­si­bil­i­ties in the search for the ulti­mate mean­ing of the uni­verse: 1) There is an ulti­mate the­o­ry describ­ing the uni­verse which we will one day dis­cov­er, if only we are smart enough (for Hawk­ing, the ulti­mate the­o­ry will be math­e­mat­i­cal); 2) There is no ulti­mate the­o­ry, just an infi­nite sequence of the­o­ries that describe the uni­verse in ever-greater detail; or, 3) The uni­verse is essen­tial­ly ran­dom and arbitrary.

Both Hawk­ing and MacLaine express a pref­er­ence for Option 1, the guru emphat­i­cal­ly so, the pro­fes­sor more ten­ta­tive­ly. Ten­ta­tive­ness, of course, is one big thing that sep­a­rates sci­ence from New Age sor­cery. MacLaine is con­fi­dent she’s on to the answers. Hawk­ing salts his spec­u­la­tions with words like “maybe,” “if,” “per­haps,” and “prob­a­bly.” He knows we are still a long way from know­ing how the uni­verse works, much less why it works.

How­ev­er, con­cludes Hawk­ing, if we ever do dis­cov­er an ulti­mate the­o­ry, it should be pos­si­ble in time for any­one to under­stand it. Then we can get on with the dis­cus­sion of why it is that we and the uni­verse exist. “If we find the answer to that,” he writes in A Brief His­to­ry of Time, “it would be the ulti­mate tri­umph of human rea­son — for then we would know the mind of God.”

An oblivious universe

Hawk­ing seeks the mind of God through quan­tum mechan­ics and rel­a­tiv­i­ty, Big Bangs and black holes, the uni­verse of the very big and the very small. He is not con­vinced that the quirks and foibles of his per­son­al life have any­thing to do with the cos­mic plan. MacLaine takes a breath­tak­ing short­cut to God’s mind through the High­er Self. Despite dif­fer­ent approach­es, the two authors have a lot in com­mon in mere­ly plump­ing for Option 1. Hawk­ing is encour­aged to believe the uni­verse has an ulti­mate plan by cer­tain tech­ni­cal fea­tures of grav­i­ty and quan­tum mechan­ics. MacLaine’s opti­mism seems (to this skep­ti­cal observ­er) pure self-indulgence.

As for myself, I lean toward Option 2, so I am rather dis­trust­ful of any claim to know, now or in the future, the ulti­mate mean­ing of the uni­verse, whether prof­fered by New Age gurus or Old Age physi­cists. I would cer­tain­ly like to have the sense of “hum­ming well-being” ten­dered at a mod­est price by Shirley MacLaine, but I am con­vinced with Stephen Hawk­ing that the uni­verse is essen­tial­ly obliv­i­ous to my plight. In place of God’s mind I will set­tle for this week’s issues of Sci­ence and Nature, and for hum­ming well-being I’ll rely on a long walk in the woods fol­lowed by a good steak and a bot­tle of wine.

After all, as MacLaine says, does­n’t it all come down to how we define order in rela­tion to how we see our­selves and our behavior?

Er, uh, well, yes, maybe. It depends, I sup­pose, on what you mean.