God and M Theory

Lubos Motl informs us that the new book by Hawking and Mlodinow, titled The Grand Design, is headed for the top of the bestseller list ... for ALL books. This is not surprising. Even here in Wellington it took up the front page of the world news last Friday, since everyone wants to see how the book hands over God's job to M Theory. When the hubbub dies down, one suspects that Hawking's popularity will henceforth diminish.

Now given that nobody actually understands M Theory, and one modern God spits on the rotten Patriarchy that abuses her name, this book is bound to generate much outdated dribble. To appreciate that M Theory describes the universe in terms of observers is to realise that a classical universal observer must be abolished, because Jill's universe cannot be John's. At the same time it forces John to allow Jill a God axiom, and Jill to accept John's disbelief. But then John's understanding that Jill's reality is posited in his own image is close to an acceptance that he himself is God, in his own universe, although his conscious self is hardly the observer that surrounds him. And if he cannot know himself then he will never know the Mind of God.

The old picture is as absurd as a flat Earth. One does not need equations to say that the Earth is a sphere, or that John and Jill inhabit the Earth, the centre of their universe. The book, however, seems to focus on the premise of the Big Bang and the existence of an essentially (oh no, not again) classical multiverse. As such, it fails to be as deliciously heretical as one would hope. And for God's sake, a leap forward in physical theory does not a Theory of Everything make.