This is from Scientific American. (H/T Reformed Seth)
Keep in mind that the author is a naturalist and an atheist, and he thinks Glenn Beck is a “right-wing nut” – i.e. – I infer that the author is a left-wing nut. But his criticisms of Hawking’s untestable theory are accurate.
Excerpt:
The “sound scientific explanation” is M-theory, which Hawking calls (in a blurb for Amazon) “the only viable candidate for a complete ‘theory of everything’.”
Actually M-theory is just the latest iteration of string theory, with membranes (hence the M) substituted for strings. For more than two decades string theory has been the most popular candidate for the unified theory that Hawking envisioned 30 years ago. Yet this popularity stems not from the theory’s actual merits but rather from the lack of decent alternatives and the stubborn refusal of enthusiasts to abandon their faith.
M-theory suffers from the same flaws that string theories did. First is the problem of empirical accessibility. Membranes, like strings, are supposedly very, very tiny—as small compared with a proton as a proton is compared with the solar system. This is the so-called Planck scale, 10^–33 centimeters. Gaining the kind of experimental confirmation of membranes or strings that we have for, say, quarks would require a particle accelerator 1,000 light-years around, scaling up from our current technology. Our entire solar system is only one light-day around, and the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful accelerator, is 27 kilometers in circumference.
This sounds like bad news for atheism and their beloved deity, but it is a strength of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (peas be upon him) to be untestable, unobservable and speculative! It’s a feature, not a bug.
UPDATE: Cool video of Roger Penrose and Alister McGrath debunking Hawking’s theory:
Atheist Roger Penrose calls it “not even a theory”. Wow. This is from Justin Brierley’s “Unbelievable” show, that I feature once in a while.
