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God is a metaphor for philosophy, says Hawking: PTI

Eminent physicist Prof Stephen Hawking Saturday said he believed in the 'laws of nature' as 'God'.

Addressing a press conference along with several eminent theoretical physicists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, Hawking, replying to a query whether he believed in God, said he viewed 'God' as metaphor of philosophy and believed in the laws of nature.

Hawking is in to participate at an international conference on 'String Theory' under the Sarojini Damodharan International Exchange Fellowship which began Friday.

Hawking, who is working on quantum gravity and cosmology had discovered the quantum radiation from Black Holes and established a profound connection between the geometry of space-time, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.

Asked whether he believed the Black Hole singularity as a real physical reality or just a mathematical singularity, Hawking said it is a physical singularity and not a mathematical singularity and 'I would not fall into one thinking that it is mathematical singularity, if it turned out to be a physical one.'

He also pointed out the dismissal of Black Holes has not been proved experimentally.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr John Schwarz and Edward Witten from California Institute of Technology and David Gross from University of California said String Theory has a long way to go in explaining unification of forces of nature but 'nature has the last word.'

Theories have to pass some tests and in case of String Theory, so far no overwhelming evidence has been unearthed, they said.

"Lot of experimental evidence is required before coming to any concrete conclusions," scientists said.

String Theory studies forces of nature at a micro-micro level and even if they find several experimental evidences, it may give complete answer to the existence of various systems in the universe, the scientists said.

Scientists also said the String Theory explains a new concept of 'geometry' thus could change the concepts of existing geometry.

Other distinguished Indian physicists participating in the conference Dr Ashok Sen from Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, Sunil Mukhi, Atish Dabholkar and Spenta Wadia of TIFR said they were working on very small entities of nature and the String Theory has helped construct a microscopic model of a Black Hole.

Wadia said that Hawking's Black Hole entropy may not find explanation as there is an intrinsic gravitational entropy which is different from hot bodies in physics.

Asked about the US government's decision of scrapping the superconducting super collider project which otherwise could be useful in experimentally proving the String Theory, the US scientists expressed that "it was a stupid decision taken by the US government, although we hope to work with Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva on the same problems."

About 300 physicists are participating in the conference.

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