Uncertainty principle

So when Hawking wheeled his way around Mumbai and Delhi this month, reacquainting Indians with their archaeological heritage and introducing them to the speculative margins of modern physics, it was perhaps inevitable that his “end of physics” remark would create the greatest flutter. It is an entirely different matter that Hawking has made a habit of announcing 20-year deadlines for the formulation of the Theory of Everything. Having declared the ultimatum back in 1979, when he was first enthroned in the Lucasian chair at Cambridge once occupied by Isaac Newton and Paul Dirac, he recently acknowledged the impending lapse of the two decades by quipping, “twenty years starts now.”

Only time — that enigmatic dimension whose end, says the bespectacled physicist, too will soon come to an end — will tell whether he will have an occasion to reset the clock circa 2020, but his success in attracting curious crowds to his lectures does highlight, once more, the end of the two cultures hypothesis.

Forty years ago, when C.P. Snow famously divided literary intellectuals and scientists into two cultures, he focused attention on the longstanding rivalry between the faculties of the arts and sciences, as well as the pitiful public space accorded to scientists. In a subsequent update he voiced the hope that a third culture was on the anvil, that men and women of letters would intervene between the jargon-spouting scientists and the blissfully ignorant public. They would establish bonds with these scientists and translate miles of formulae and sheaves of complicated diagrams into intelligible prose.

Well, someone’s doing that, and with great success. But, as writer John Brockman first formally stated a few years ago, in a curious twist these third culturists are not literary intellectuals. Scientists themselves are updating the reading classes on the latest paradigms and theories. It is a success attested to by the millions who snapped up copies of A Brief History of Time, Hawking’s flirtation with the publishing industry to pay for his daughter’s education which became the bestselling book of all time after the Bible. It is a success proved by the surprise ascent of superstring theorist Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe up the bestseller lists last year.

It is a success also hinted at in scientists’ perception of the arts and the literary fraternity’s response to their emerging bonds with the wider public. Writer-physicist Paul Davies, for instance, cites the hostile reaction to Hawking’s presumption in seeking to divine the “mind of God”. Writes Davies: “So long as scientists restrict themselves to their laboratories, they are tolerated by the literary establishment — shrugged aside as nerds of little consequence — and the implications of their obscure and incomprehensible work are ignored. But what incenses these opinionated literati most is when scientists dare to tangle with `meaning-of-life’ issues.”

If this backlash is thankfully conspicuous by its very absence in India, it is complemented with a virtual, and immensely worrying, silence on scientific issues. It is almost as if the second culture does not even exist. Does the fault lie in an education system that separates the arts and the sciences so comprehensively early in a student’s life? Or should the reasons be sought elsewhere? For example, in the failure of Indian scientists to make their talks more accessible to lay persons and to shun the rituals of meandering preambles and votes of thanks, as J.V. Narlikar recently suggested? Or is the enthusiasm generated by the Hawking tour illusory? Did the thousands flock to see the man — a pop icon of sorts, as some have ventured to speculate — and not hear out his thoughts?

Or maybe the cure lies in the endism the likes of Hawking so revel in. Maybe it will take the possibility — which we are repeatedly reminded is just a few leaps of insight away — of settling down with a tightly formulated theory which will answer all questions to entice multitaskers to take a few hours to catch up with cutting-edge research. After all, most of the popular books on fundamental physics carry teasers on their jacket about the quest for the ultimate theory, or the imminence of the Theory of Everything (TOE).

It is interesting that many physicists do not share the opinion that TOE would herald the end of physics. By TOE, they imply a reconciliation of the currently irreconcilable quantum theory and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, with one operating on the smallest of scales and the other on the largest. An attendant characteristic of this TOE would be the unification of the four know forces in nature.

Will it spell the end of possibilities? Will it render the world around us more deterministic? Will it imprison us in certainties and stifle imagination? Will it, in fact, allow us a glimpse into the mind of God? The endless options effectively smother all fears of the end of physics. Mathematician John D. Barrow quotes a wise, if anonymous, person: “An optimist is someone who thinks the future is uncertain.”