The End of Time

All of a sudden, cosmology seems to be the sexy topic in the mainstream media's coverage of science. (Could Stephen Hawking have anything to do with that?)

Here is what seems to me a rather scatterbrained bit of speculation on the way in which the laws of physics and probability dictate that time will have to come to an end sometime within the next, oh, 3.7 billion years. (Nothing lends scientific credibility to a number like a decimal point, does it?)

I'd be more inclined to dismiss this bit of speculation as quickly as I do most cosmological ruminations if it weren't for a single line in the story that seems to ring true for some reason. The scientists involved "don't know what kind of catastrophe will cause the end of time, but they do say that we won't see it coming."


Hmmm. Do they mean it will be sort of like "a thief in the night"?

Stephen Hawking, Theologian?

The physicist Stephen Barr thinks that there is less to Stephen Hawking's latest speculations about God and cosmology than Hawking's publisher and the secular media would like there to be.  As I read Prof. Barr's explanation of what Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow are arguing in The Grand Design, it occurred to me that their claims are not only not antagonistic to the claims of religion, but that they might actually be seen as pointing toward the validity of some of those claims.

But I was a little too lazy and way too scientifically ignorant to undertake an exploration of that subject. Now, fortunately, someone who is up to the task has done it, and his analysis, at Mike Flynn's Journal, is well worth reading.

My only regret in linking to the post is that now I'll never be able to pass off as my own this great Mary Midgley line:

"People who refuse to have anything to do with philosophy have become enslaved to outdated forms of it."