I wonder what the philosophy of physics group at Oxford would make of that!
Having read quite a few papers on the philosophy of physics, I'd say Hawking and his coauthor are spot on. Most philosophers of physics seem to not really understand the physics they are supposed to be philosophers of. For example, most treat the models of advanced physics as if they are reality. And true, they might be, they seem to work very well in the real world and have predictive value. But, so did/does newtonian physics. The newtonian model works very well as long as you only look at human perceivable physics. Throw a rock in the air, newtonian physics works just fine. Get close to massive object like a star and things break down. Or move some decent fraction of the speed of light. Or try to analyze things on an atomic level.
The upshot is that Newtonian physics is only an approximate model. Relativistic physics is the same. There are places where it breaks down, like on the atomic or smaller level. Or if the speed of light is not really the limit. Quantum entanglement seems to show that isn't the case. Yes, there are convoluted reasons why you can't use it to communicated information faster than the speed of light. But they are very strained. It is sort of like when Einstein made his Great Mistake. He wanted a universe that was static and unchanging. But a problem arises. With the available forces, any universe is going to collapse on itself due to gravity. So he postulated a cosmological constant that would prevent that. Which bothered him, that seemed too much like magic. He eventually tweaked some stuff and removed it. For a while, the discovery of the Big Bang papered over the problem. Until the 1990s when we could observe the early universe with our newly developed tools and check into how much the expansion of the universe is slowing due to gravitation. Turns out, the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, it is accelerating. That brought in the concept of dark energy. When they calculated the value for dark energy, it was somewhat larger than Einstein's cosmological constant.
Most of the reasons why quantum entanglement cannot communicate information faster than the speed of light is to make it conform to General Relativity. See where this is going?
Bottom line, relativistic physics is an incomplete model. When attempts are made to align it with quantum mechanics, weaknesses pop up.
But most philosophers of physics take General Relativity as reality. It isn't. Never was intended to be. It has always been a model to explain things that newtonian physics cannot. And a remarkably good model it has been. Very strong predictive value that still holds up in many ways. But, as at the last turn of the century, it is starting to show its age. I don't know of any philosopher of physics who has picked up on that, although I haven't really looked in the past going on a decade. |
