Would life be as dear, or philosophy so sweet, without your daily dose of positivism? I learned last night, according to Hawking, that the claim that "time had a beginning at the big bang" amounts to nothing more than this:
In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite. This means that even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang. Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang. -Hawking, A Brief History of Time
I had previously thought scientists were saying something more controversial. All Hawking is saying is that we can't have pre-big bang time in our scientific model since any propositions or sentences referring to it would not be subject to empirical verification through the testing of predictions. Ok, fine. But that says nothing about whether or not, before the big bang, time was around (it was), when I ask the "outside the model" question like a normal human being (or a scientist before his pet theory sucks his life out of him). It only says what our model can tell us. Fortunately, philosophy can tell us some things that scientific models cannot. (I hope you agree. If not, post a comment!) This book is filled with positivistic quotes - maybe I'll post some more later.
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