Stephen Hawking says there is no God. But,...

William Tu

After watching Discovery's documentary "Curiosity: Did God Create the Universe?", I can't stop but wondering,... Dr. Hawking claims that there is no time in a black hole. Time stops due to the Gravitational time dilation. The very beginning of the universe is also a black hole. There is no time, so God has no time to create the universe. So God didn't create the universe, according to Dr. Hawking.

According to the theory of relativity, the "no time", however, is how the observer outside the black hole perceives. Relative to the outside observer, the time inside the black hole still ticks at its own pace. It doesn't stop inside the black hole. So time doesn't stop, it is just relatively very slow to the outside.

So what does Dr. Hawking mean when he says there is no time?

phinds

You seem to have seriously misunderstood what Hawking undoubted said.

The very beginning of the universe was NOT a black hole and I'm sure he did not say that it was. What he MAY have said was that a black hole is a singularity and that the beginning of the universe was a singularity. This does NOT equate the beginning of the universe with a black hole it just means that neither of them are comprehensible to our math models of how things work.

EDIT: Also, your statement "Relative to the outside observer, the time inside the black hole still ticks at its own pace" is exactly backwards. It's relative to the INSIDE observed that the black hold time ticks at its own pace. Relative to the OUTSIDE observer, time stops at the event horizon.

William Tu

Hey, first thanks for replying! And, yeah, you are right. But my question remains. What does Dr. Hawking mean when he says there is NO TIME? According to the theory of relativity, the observer outside of a black hole perceives a slower ticking clock which falls into the black hole. However, for the clock itself, time still ticks at its own pace. Just the time outside the the black hole ticks much faster and faster. But the time doesn't STOP.

Nonetheless in this documentary, Dr. Hawking says time stops. What does he mean?

phinds

He means that time APPEARS, to the outside observer, to stop at the event horizon.

William Tu

Yes! That's what I think too. But in the documentary, at 38' 59", he says ... "here too, time must come to a stop. You can't get to a time before the big bang because there was no before the big bang, ... there is no cause because there is no time for a cause to exist. For me it means there is no possibility of a creator. Because there is no time for a creator to exist. ... time didn't exist before the big bang, ... so there is no time for creator to make the universe,... there is no God. "

No Time is the key in Dr. Hawking's entire argument. However, it is not NO TIME according to the theory of relativity. Doesn't that mean Dr. Hawking's argument in this documentary is wrong?

phinds

Ah ... now you are talking about something entirely different. You really need to get rid of the concept of conflating black holes with the big bang. They just are not related in any way (other than that they are both sometimes descirbed as "singluarities" but this does NOT equate them".

What Hawking is talking about is that the "standard" cosomological model blows up at what WOULD be "t=0" if you track time backwards from now to the beginning. According to some (including him) this means that there WAS no time prior to the big bang. Others feel that there WAS something prior to the big bang. It's a theological argument at present because it is not subject to any proof or evidence.

There are two meanings to "big bang". One is the big bang EVENT, which is also called the "singularity" which is shorthand for "we don't have a clue what happened there" or what, if any thing did, or even could have, gone before it). Everything about the singularity is speculation.

The other, much more useful, meaning of "big bang" is the unfolding of the universe starting at the Plank Time (about 10E-43 seconds after the singularity). THIS part is relatively well understood. I refer you to Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes".

William Tu

Yeah, thanks! OK. I will take a look at the book you suggest. From your words, you perhaps didn't watch the documentary? If you would like to, you can watch it on YouTube here before it is deleted. http://youtu.be/A2IOOnAdP2s

In the documentary, the arguments aren't supported by equations, but suggest the ideas. And I find it pretty weird concerning NO TIME.

phinds

William,

If you want to actually learn physics, as opposed to just gain some passing knowledge of "gee whiz" ideas, I strongly suggest that you absolutly avoid the popularizations done by Hawking, Brian Cox, Micho Kaku, and others, and most particularly "Through the Wormhole". They all play fast and loose with the facts so as to address a general audience, but "throught the Wormhole" makes blatant and serious mistakes. They all get slammed regularly on this forum for their mistakes. They ARE entertaining and have generally good production values EXCEPT for the actual facts that they represent (or MISrepresent).

PAllen

I assume you mean Brian Greene ?

phinds

No, actually if I had meant Brian Green I would have said Brian Green. Since I meant Brian Cox, I said Brian Cox. Could be you made that comment because I may have unfailrly lumped Cox in with others. I admit that I do not specifically recall him having said anything blatantly wrong or even misleading, but I tend to think that of all the popularizers.

PAllen

No, I thought you meant Greene because he's more famous, looser with the analogy, so I guessed that's who you meant. Obviously I guessed wrong.

Fredrik

It's hard to know what he meant by the things you're saying, because you seem to be confusing two different things. As far as I know, there's nothing about the big bang that corresponds to the weird effects at the event horizon of a black hole. What black holes and the big bang have in common is that timelike curves parametrized by proper time can't be defined beyond a certain value of the parameter. In the case of a black hole, this is true for all world lines that describe particles that have passed the event horizon, and the time where the curves "end" is in the future. In the case of the big bang, it's true for all world lines, and the time where the curves "end" is in the past.

Cosmo Novice

I dont think you should lump in Brian Cox, if you watch his Wonders series - Ive seen them all, he is actually very accurate with his choice of words. To tar either Wonders with the same brush as Through the Wormhole is not a very fair comment.

Wonders series are fabulous! The mountain shots can be tedious but as an engaging factual piece its great, the explanation of entropy i was very impressed with.

phinds

OK, that's fair enough. As I said already, I do not recall having heard him say anything wrong or misleading. On the other hand, he grates on me. It might just be the British accent but he sounds a bit smarmy to me. And I DO think that the popularizers almost as much harm as good. ALMOST, I say, because they DO get folks interested in science and that's a very good thing and may even overcome the nonsense they sometimes propogate.

Ryan_m_b

The other night he was on a chat show and told the other guests "there are an infinite number of universes where an infinite number of things are happening. Therefore there is a universe where...[something to do with the trivial topic of conversation]." Such blatant popularisation and assertion of many-worlds theory does not endear me to him.

That and a large number of my female friends find him irresistible

William Tu

Haha :D I didn't watch "Through The Wormhole", but to be honest I am a big fan of Dr. Kaku. So, it is probably a bit too late. I found some ebooks of "The First 3 Minutes" on the Internet but they are incomplete,... To really think about these, a lot of time should be perhaps spent on math, to get a better grip. But how to make that kind of time from a daily life? To actually learn physics,... hmm, I learnt from the freshman textbook in university but that's all. After many years, all the other interesting ideas like Relativity and Astronomy I know are from these science communicators and online Open Courses. Just for fun. I don't know how much deeper I wanna go into the rabbit hole yet.

William Tu

If you would like to, you take take a look at the video here http://youtu.be/A2IOOnAdP2s directly from 32'38". It won't take you too much time. The whole argument starts from "the cause", and I think it probably went wrong in the end. And the main problem to me is that he says time stops. But according to relativity, time doesn't stop but simply looks slow from the outside observer. The clock which falls into the black hole still ticks at its own pace. Time doesn't stop inside the event horizon. But here in this documentary, Dr. Hawking suggests the idea that the very beginning of the universe is a big black hole and time stops,... he says there was no time. This contradicts what we know from the relativity. There is time. Just ticks in a different pace from the outside of the black whole.