By Christophe Doré
Is there a great architect in the Universe? No, says the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in book event (Odile Jacob), including Le Figaro Magazine published excerpts of the exclusive.
A highly controversial theory. Scientists, philosophers and believers meet him.
Why is there something rather than nothing? "The question of the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz soon will the news Thursday with the release in France of the last book of the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, there a great architect in the Universe? (Odile Jacob).
This return to the front of the stage of a metaphysical question back to the seventeenth century may seem surprising. Beyond raising the debate facing our daily hassles, ending balances, or the cast of Season 2 of "Masterchef" (TF1), the question is part of a trend that is emerging in the scientific community.
Stephen Hawking has a double conviction. Researchers must not only answer the question "How the Universe evolves?" But also this: "Why is there a Universe?" He is not alone in thinking so.
The pact was that science respond to "how", leaving religions address the problem of "why" would have no reason to be both research rubs today to gasoline of our world. The border is long respected in the process of transfer, leaving the aisle philosophers. From the second paragraph of his introduction, Stephen Hawking their rule on their behalf: "The philosophy is dead, having failed to follow the developments of modern science, especially physics" ... "So ... That's it! "Say teenagers. But the famous British astrophysicist who occupies the pulpit at Cambridge History of Isaac Newton did not stop there. "It's the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything, which we try to answer in this book," says he. We suspect qu'Hawking had not been writing to clarify the difficult art of sorting her laundry before washing, but the company is ambitious to say the least.
When it appeared in its English version (The Grand Design), the book provoked an outcry impressive. Anglican archbishops and chief rabbi, imam or Catholic bishop, but also atheists jumped on him honest about shortcuts. "Physics can not answer alone to the question" Why is there something rather than nothing ", some criticize the cosmologist nailed by a degenerative disease in a wheelchair since his university years. "The metaphysical discourse to which Hawking slips is not seriously supported, criticizing others.
Colleagues astrophysicists do not spare either. According to them, Hawking does not bring new things from one of the greatest successes of the scientific literature, A Brief History of Time, popular book he published in 1989. Indeed, it contradicts itself.
Nevertheless, by giving an answer intellectually attractive to the creation of the world, the book by Stephen Hawking is a particular resonance in this eternal issue between God and science. According to him, the Universe - Or rather the universe - do not need a creator because the laws of gravity and those of quantum physics provides a model of the universe being created themselves. This theory, called M-theory, this still one major flaw: it remains to prove that recognizes Stephen Hawking. Another caveat: it is not the only theory currently championed by cosmologists seriously.
In his Discourse on the Origin of the Universe (Flammarion), physicist Stephen Klein recalls that, although the review, "the prospects that we offer contemporary cosmology are more breathtaking than we imagined." It This story also tells that Pope John Paul II, receiving the Vatican Stephen Hawking, he reportedly said: "We quite agree, sir astrophysicist. There after the big bang is for you, and what comes before it for us. "It was probably forgotten that men's curiosity is boundless. God is now no longer taboo among scientists, whether it's possible to delete or prove its existence. Jean Staune is a great defender of this debate. This Catholic, professor and director of the "Science and religion" of Presses de la Renaissance, has the meaning of the slogan and says that "God comes back hard!" Far from killing the idea of a god, modern science and the issues they raise are facing more and more to the hypothesis of a great creator, says he. If it does not adhere to the findings of Stephen Hawking, he respects the approach of the scientist.
Bogdanov brothers, authors of bestseller The Face of God, also surf on this topic. The title of their book, inspired by a word astrophysicist George Smoot (Nobel Prize) when he discovered the first images from the depths of the Universe, is explicit. These believers say detect, in cosmic rays and fine tuning of the universe, the existence of a creator. For his second component, this theory is partly borrowed from the American astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan. Buddhist, he defends the idea of a creative principle manifested in the physical laws of nature. This pantheistic view is similar to that of Spinoza or Einstein. "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmonious order of what exists, not a god who cares about the fate and actions of human beings," wrote the latter in April 1929 to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein New York.
In context, we are far from the principles of the father of scientific determinism, Laplace. He replied to Napoleon, who questioned on the question of God and the Universe: "Sir, I do not need this hypothesis." refraining to refrain, scientists from the twenty-first century answer him today: a hypothesis rather than nothing. Stephen Hawking is one of them.
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