Queen Mary 2 astronomy lectures

I am all aboard Queen Mary 2 October 19 - October 25 2010 as Royal Astronomical Society guest lecturer on astronomy for Cunard's enrichment programme

Stephen Hawking, God, philosophy,science and religion

My Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking is front page news with his comment that the originof the universe does not require a supernatural creator. This is all part of a marketing push by the publisher of his latest book,and follows a trend set by Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, and Pierre-Simon Laplace (Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.' "I had no need of that hypothesis.")

But has Stephen said anything new? I have not read the book, but the news coverage fails to mention that the anthropic principle, for example, was first put forward by one of Hawking's Cambridge colleagues about 30 years ago. There's nothing remotely new in the observation that the grand total energy content of the universe can be zero. In the late 1920s the Cambridge astrophysicist Eddington had a model in which a primeval atom is static and unchanging for eons until suddenly bursting into life explosively. So the application of quantum ideas to cosmology has along and respectable history.

I'm curious about Stephen's attack on philosophers. Perhaps modern philosophers have become too introverted for his taste. Cosmology was started 2500 years ago by philosopher-geometers who broke away from the magical philosophy of Egypt and Mesopotamia

You can read my take on the recent history of cosmology at Cambridge in my biography of Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who rjected the Big Bang. http://bit.ly/6rvVr

There's a .ppt slide show on Hoyle on this site: http://bit.ly.TOTast