Delhi puts ear close to the door as Hawking speaks

Delhi puts ear close to the door as Hawking speaks
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

NEW DELHI, JANUARY 17: When a man captures Delhi's centrestage claiming to have returned after a most fulfilling poker session with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, you cannot help but submit credulity to this most charming of historians of time. And when he happens to be one of the few folks around credited with a hazy inkling of the contours of the much-awaited Theory of Everything, a breakthrough that would announce the end of physics, you sit still and give in to an hour of mental calisthenics.

That's what thousands of Delhiites did on Wednesday evening as Professor Stephen Hawking took to the podium and delivered a lecture on ``Predicting the future: From astrology to black holes''. In the process, the man who has authored the biggest bestseller of all time, after the Bible, carried the motley, if huge, gathering towards a tantalising glimpse of mankind's tryst with uncertainty, towards a romance with the unexpected.

If popular wisdom has it that the inexorable march of science is taking us to a deterministic future when every effect has a cause, where all can be foretold, he did his best to convince listeners that, in fact, recent strides in physics point to even more uncertainties. But this was the crux of Hawking's thesis: It is not whether a theory can be tested that is all-important, what's important is that it be consistent with tested theories.

``The human race has always wanted to control the future, or at least, to predict what will happen. That's why astrology is so popular.'' With those words Hawking began his presentation in a land seeing an increasing number of people taking recourse to the message in the stars to negotiate daily obstacle races. ``The experimental evidence for string theory, and the effects I shall be talking about, is even less than for astrology. However, we believe them, because they are consistent with tested theories.''

And so started a journey in time. From the days of Newton when knowledge about the universe at a particular point in time allowed you knowledge about its past and future. Onto Werner Heisenberg's little bombshell: The more accurately one can measure the position of a particle, the more the uncertainty about its speed, and vice-versa. To, just a little later, when this uncertainty principle was incorporated into quantum mechanics, which restored the old determinism in a modified form.

It took Einstein to shake all this up again, when he in 1905 specified the spacetime continuum, thus destroying the absoluteness of time, and then in 1915 elaborated on the warped nature of spacetime in his General Theory of Relativity.

Old stuff, all this, but Hawking captured it with lucid brevity, and then introduced the concept of black holes, those dark stars from which no light, no matter, no information can escape. He posed the imponderable, what happens when a black hole (which he contends ``not completely black'') disappears? Does the information that was held within disappear, or is it retrievable to the rest of us in the universe?

Resorting to a somewhat rigorous introduction to the ``Einstein-Podalsky-Rosen thought experiment'' and to the very recent ``p-branes'' theory, he said: ``Most physicists want to believe that information is not lost, because that would mean that the world would be safe and predictable. Nothing unexpected could happen.'' Hawking, however, disagreed: ``I feel that if one takes Einstein's General Theory of Relativity seriously, one must allow the possibility that spacetime ties itself in a knot, and information gets lost in the folds.''

And he concluded by joking that it was by going through one wormhole that he met Einstein. Then again, was that actually a joke? Don't blame the thousands who occupied every square inch of sitting and standing space in the prim auditorium if they are still trying to figure that one out.

However, there is one certainty they all no doubt carried out with them: The moment when that hypnotisingly still visage on the giant screen suddenly broke out into a conspiratorial smile.