Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Arthur C. Clarke - God, The Universe and Everything Else (1988)

tonight the time before time began the universe black holes God and the laws of science Professor Steven Hawking Dr Carl San and Arthur Clark discuss the Mysteries man faces as he starts to explore the Stars [Music] Dreadful disabilities prevent Steven Hawking from speaking a word but he's risen above them to become a brilliant mathematician and teacher using a computer-driven voice synthesizer he's told the world How the Universe began and now he's seeking the ultimate theory of how it works Arthur C Clark invented the communication satellite long before the technology existed to launch one that vision

of the future fathered the global village his novels and stories including 2001 A Space Odyssey have inspired a generation of real life astronauts Carl Sean sent Man's first messages to the Stars aboard NASA space probes he's sure we're not alone in the cosmic Wilderness Dr Sean joined discussion from Cornell University in New York state so I checked whether he could hear us over one of Arthur's satellites yes communication satellite technology is working very well thank you Arthur can you hear all right I can hear fine and Professor Hawking are you in touch with Carl San

yes Professor Hawking in fact has just made publishing history by writing a book about hard theoretical science which has outsold even Michael Jackson in the bestseller s it's called A Brief History of Time and we'll be talking about the concepts that are in it now Steven Hawking is engaged in a search for the ultimate answer a grand unified theory that would explain everything Stephen Hawking that is quite an agenda how are you getting on with it let me just explain that what happens when Professor Hawking wishes to to speak he lost his voice a couple

of years ago and now has to use a voice synthesizer and he can control A Squeeze Box in his hand and on the vdu screen on the arm of his chair he's got a vocabulary which Scrolls through and he can pick out the words that he wants and these words are then assembled into a sentence and when the sentence is ready then he can process it through the the voice synthesizer so whenever you're ready professor we'd like to hear from you in the last 300 years we have discovered the laws that govern the universe in

all but the most extreme conditions I think there is a reasonable chance that we may find a complete set of laws by the end of the century if we don't blow ourselves up first if we do find a complete unified theory it will be a great Triumph not just for scientists but for ordinary people as well in time the unified theory would be simplified and taught in schools at least in outline then everyone would have some idea of how the universe works well that is a tremendous Vision now Carl Sean you wrote an introduction to

the book and one of the Striking things that you said is that it's only children nowadays who ask the big questions because they don't know enough not to what I was trying to get across was uh the notion that the school systems uh it seems to me have a uh a um attitude of discouragement of asking fundamental questions if uh if a five or six-year-old asks why the Moon is round or why grass is green the usual adult answer at least in my experience is to discourage the child say what what shape did you expect

the moon to be square or what color did you expect the grass to be blue uh instead of saying that uh those are interesting questions let's try to find out the answer or maybe Nobody Knows the answer and uh and when you grow up you'll be able to discover the answer it would be very healthy for the human species if uh there were less discouragement and more scientists Arthur Clark one of the reasons why I write science fiction is because it does free the imagination and does inspire people to become scientists and astronauts many astronauts

have made me feel A Very Old Man by coming up and saying to me you know your books turned me on when I was a small boy excellent now I have planned a a reasonably finite structure for our little colloquium and I'd like to start if I may with Professor Hawking how did the universe start with a big bang we observe that distance galaxies are moving away from us this means that they must have been closer together in the past in fact one can show that all the galaxies must have been on top of each

other about 15 billion years ago this was a real big bang not the puny thing that took place on the stock exchange a couple of years ago it was the beginning of the universe and of time itself anything that happened before the Big Bang could not affect what happened after so we can neglect events before the Big Bang and say that time began at the big bang after the big bang we believe that the Universe expanded in a very rapid inflationary manner again this inflation in the universe quite puts modern economic inflation in the shade

an increase of billions of billions of percent in a tiny fraction of a second of course that was before the present government during the inflationary period the universe burrowed heavily from its gravity vitational energy to finance the creation of more matter the result was a Triumph for the economics of CHS a vigorous and expanding Universe filled with material objects the de of gravitational energy will not have to be repayed until the end of the universe I'd like to stay with this basic proposition for the time being The Big Bang Theory and to come to you

Carl San could you help me by putting into layman's terms what was involved with this big bang well we uh here we are on a planet which is uh about 5,000 million years old uh the sun around which it goes is not much older it is part of a galaxy uh which is perhaps uh 10 or 12,000 million years old which is one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of millions of other galaxies and none of this planets Suns galaxies was around at the time of the Big Bang at the time of the big bang There

was uh energy Elementary particles which slowly evolved into the kind of universe we know today we are the product of a grand evolutionary sequence Cosmic Evolution uh about which we are only occasion Al aware one of the Great accomplishments of Dr Hawking is to plug us better in to the knowledge of this long evolutionary sequence well what I have in in my mind is a picture that Carl San had been leading me towards of U the whole universe in quite amazingly small packages like putting the whole world into a matchbox as it were immensely dense

and immensely tiny and in fact so tiny it's it's kind of Disappearing into a little point is this the is this the the the earliest imaginable point that that our minds are taking us to so far Carl San well the uh as Dr Hawkings said the galaxies are expanding uh running away from each other the further away they are from each other the faster they are running away if you run the cosmic movie back into time you come to a moment perhaps 15,000 million years ago in which all the matter in the universe was touching

in if you like uh a point and uh a key unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question is where did all of that matter energy come from what was before that uh and if it was made from nothing who made it and uh who made the maker uh and of course an infinite regress behind that is the universe still expanding fast I mean is there a lot more room in space as as I think of it for the the universe to carry on getting bigger as far as I know nothing in the way and uh the expansion

continues the question is whether there is sufficient matter in the universe matter that we have not yet counted that will slow the expansion down stop it and have the expanding Universe followed by a collapsing universe or whether there is not enough matter to stop the expansion and so the expansion then continues Forever This is an observational question which is still unresolved and uh the Hubble Space Telescope which uh who knows might be launched uh next year if we're lucky uh might answer this question Professor Hawkin used this very striking metaphor of the earth borrowing its

energy from itself now in straight banking terms that means you're going to be overdrawn and in the end there's going to be a collapse a big crunch so does Big Bang get followed inevitably by Big Crunch no not inevitably it depends on how much matter there is in the universe which is a still unsolved issue I should say that uh the prevailing opinion is that uh the universe will continue expanding forever but that in my opinion is uh is by no means a very secure conclusion well let me bring in the poet amongst us here

Arthur Clark you know what TS Elliot said this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper when you think of the end of the world if you think of the end of the world does it end with a bang or a whimper well one would like to think that we will end with a bang of course we'll never know it is a rather a long way in the future uh some billions tens of billions possibly even much further in the future and as Carl said we may have the answers to

these questions in a very few years if the Hubble Space Telescope gets successfully into orbit and can peer out to the boundaries of the universe if we are sort of living in a little suburb of the Galaxy can you foresee a time when we'd need to get out of the the suburb and colonize somewhere else because of the gradual curve towards uh the end well I think the human race if it survives the next few years will go on to colonize first the solar system and then to send uh ships out to the stars and

ultimately perhaps to other galaxies but if the expansion of the universe is fast enough we will never be able to keep up with it now one fascinating aspect that is raised is the question of time itself in the book now we all think that we know what time is it's a Relentless March forward but for the purposes of your argument Steven Hawking you use a mathematical concept that you call imaginary time which seems to be able to run backwards as well as forwards in our theories there are two kinds of time there is what is

called real time this is the kind of time that is measured by a clock the time that we feel passing the time in which we grow older then there is imaginary time of course imaginary time is an idea that science fiction writers like Arthur have used in their stories but imaginary time is also a well- defined mathematical concept it can be thought of as a direction of time that is at right angles to ordinary real time in a certain sense the universe has a beginning in real time at a big bang and it may well

have an end if it collapses to a big crunch but an imaginary time that has no beginning or end rather IM imaginary time is closed in on itself like the surface of the Earth the surface of the Earth doesn't have any beginning or end I know because I have been around the world and I didn't fall off individual particles can travel through imaginary time and arrive back at an earlier real time but I don't believe that people will ever be able to travel back in time like in the film Back to the Future I'm going

to come first if I may to to you Carl San because this idea in in Professor Hawkings book this extraordinary four-dimensional model of the universe With No Boundaries um but finite just like the Earth this to me is is really stretching my own capacity for imagination to to the utmost how do you how would you turn it into words for Mia Layman well the first thing I would say is uh not to feel bad if it's not immediately intuitively obvious our uh our ability uh to uh understand things instantly so-called Common Sense derives from a

certain range of size and speed and duration uh that are appropriate for human existence we know about things from a tenth of a millimeter to a few kilometers from a fraction of a second to a to a lifetime uh and so on so when we are dealing with matters of quantum physics where uh particles have a size of 10us 13th CM or in cosmology where uh where we are talking about uh 10 billion light years or more it is very reasonable that our intuition is not adequate to the task one point I'd like to make

about this is that every human culture has a set of creation myths uh but they're in the realm of Mythology or religion or folklore uh and they are of course all mutually inconsistent the great thing that is happening in our time is that we are able through a method which can actually make some progress towards the real Universe out there to find out something about Origins and this is the scientific method applied to the science of cosmology so I know that's not a direct answer to your question but I thought it was more important to

to address the issue of feeling unhappy because it wasn't immediately understandable well yes I find that extremely soothing actually because it is a kind of it is a kind of sort of formidable task of grasping this that makes me want to retreat into trivial questions like is this idea of predicting backwards going to put astrologers out of business nothing will put astrologers out of business alas that certainly added a touch of lightness to these tremendous issues that we are discussing Infinity black holes and imagin time and at this stage let's um this stage let's relax

a little bit and have a bit of fun with mathematics at their most abstruse I'm going to ask Arthur Clark here to do some doodling with his computer and with a fascinating exercise with complex numbers which is called the mandal BR set now this is named in honor of a French scientist working for IBM it's a mathematical equation which lead leads us towards the infinite in effect it makes the mathematics of the universe Visual and incredibly beautiful this is what we would see if we had eyes to see it when order meets chaos this is

what's going on in the universe every day an ordered universe is breaking down and becoming more disordered this is the second law of Thermodynamics in action what Steven Hawking calls Murphy's Law now Dr Clark you've been using your computer back home in Sri Lanka to explore the Mandel BR set at incredibly High um magnifications over to you sir yes well this strange looking object is the mandle BR set which actually is extraordinarily simple in concept it's defined by an equation of just two terms z^ + C that's all there is to it yeah that simple

equation z^ s or z^2 plus C you feed a number into then carry on over and over again sort of cranking the number back round and round and then plot the result on the screen so I won't go into details but this is the first appearance of this set and what it does it divides all possible numbers into two categories it's really a map or a boundary or a fence if you like dividing one class of numbers from another and you can tell your computer to go into any spot here and say recompute that area

to a higher degree of precision and then blow it up on the screen so you can use the computer as a microscope and you can continue that process forever some of the images are incredibly beautiful and are going to have a great impact on artistic design in the next decade or so um I found what look like black holes and I like to show them to you so what I'm going to do now essentially is to zoom into it increasing the magnification uh manyfold and if I press the right button it should happen now the

computer will now give you this image and I think you'll agree when it comes up it's a very impressive black hole and it'll be even more so when I started interaction oh yes it is magnificent isn't it oh you ain't seen nothing yet I should explain that this magnification you remember the original picture which it took about the same area this time I've magnified it about a thousand times so the picture you saw first is now 500 ft across now let's see if this works now isn't that lovely so there is matter streaming into this

black hole well now when I found this black black hole I started exploring the neighborhood and I I very quickly found another indeed now this that's lovely now this is the second black hole now it looks just like the earlier one but this is on a far greater magnification the original mandle brat set now is I think about 10 million miles wide this is enormously bigger than the first one you saw yet essentially it's the same kind of pattern this is black Cole number three and this one took me 22 hours of computing the day

before I left Sri Lanka had the computer running all night and I'm rather proud of this one because on this scale that original little picture you saw is the width of the orbit of Mars so you you understand that no human being has ever seen that picture pattern before simply because of probabilities and you can explore the mandle BR set by blowing up bits and pieces of it and you pretty sure that no one's ever seen that you're the first person to see it and each time you're being drawn towards you being sucked into it

mathematical Infinity into smaller and yes this is real mathematical Infinity this goes on forever and ever limited only by the capacity of your machine and the speed with which it can do its calculations I am doing calculations here you may not be able to see that enormously long number the 20 digigit numbers or so and the Machine is multiplying those together hundreds of times a second now the thing that fascinates me about this is that it is infinite in detail you can go on forever and ever now I would like to ask Steven this question

is the real Universe also infinite in detail I mean we know we have molecules atoms electrons protons subatomic right down to the quarks so far but does it continue forever and ever or is there a limit is there a basement to the real Universe Professor Hawking we will discover new structures when look at a Universe on smaller and smaller scales but in the case of the universe there seems to be a limiting scale it is called a plank length and it's about a million billion billion times smaller than an inch this means that there is

a limit to how complete a universe can be it also means that a universe could be described by a theory that is fairly simple at least on scales of the plank length I just hope that we are smart enough to find it are we smart enough to find it Arthur well I wonder because after all we're still pretty primitive organisms and the is very old and uh I just don't know I would like to think so but then there's a feeling when we found it then what where do we go from here I'd like to

turn our attention back now to Professor Steven Hawking do you think that we could ever hope to use the old science fiction trick of diving into a black hole and then traveling to another part of the cosmos some recent work indicates that particles that fall into a black hole can come out again from another black hole somewhere else in the universe at first sight this seems the ideal method of space travel just find a black hole and jump in it but there are snacks first there doesn't seem to be any way to choose where you

come out worse than that your history in real time would come to a sticky end as you were torn apart by the gravitational fields inside a black hole your history and imaginary time would continue out of the other black hole but that might not be much consolation to someone being made into spaghetti it would be like traveling on some lines I could name so how do you see the the actual role of Science Fiction is it purely escapism or do you see it as having a a a very real purpose in broadening our our patterns

of thinking opening our minds to the kind of of vast Concepts which we're discussing today well first of all there's no re objection to escapism in the right places in fact CS Lewis once remarked to me the only people who don't like who object to escapism are are jailers and um we all want to escape occasionally but science fiction is often very far from escapism in fact you might say that science fiction is escape is escape into reality it's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues the origin of and our future in fact

I don't think of I cannot think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues and reality well what do you have to say to that Professor Hawking I don't believe in stories of flying saucers another unidentified flying objects if time travel were possible we should have already been visited by people from the future I think if we were being visited by people from another time or another planet it would be much more obvious and probably very unpleasant I don't want to make contact with another civilization except at a safe distance it

might be like the North American Indians making contact with the white men I bet they wish they had never sold Manhattan I bet they did now Carl you are the world's leading expert in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence now Professor Hawking doesn't want to make contact with them why do you want to make contact with them well uh first off I would say we have little choice in the matter um that is uh we have already announced or rather I should say Magnus you fellows have already announced uh the fact that there is a low-level

technical civilization in this part of the Galaxy because television programs uh get out at the speed of light uh and since any other civilization who detects those signals is unlikely to be at or before our state of technological Advance since we just invented radio technology so to say they are much more likely to be in our technological future and uh the question as to whether their intentions are benign or otherwise is of course of interest but we have nothing to say about uh about the matter so therefore I think we might as well hope that

it's benign if they're if they're out there from my point of view the search for extraterrestrial life and especially the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is one of the key philosophical scientific and human questions that have been posed but we are at the very beginning of searching surely it is important for us to know the answer one thing that interests me a great deal is the way in which the public perception of uh beings from outer space have have changed over the years they used to be the baddies but now there is a there's a sort

of optimistic feeling that any extraterrestrial life is if not benign it's at least not as as hostile and aggressive as one used to fear is this the drift of your writing as well Arthur your thinking yes I an optimist and I believe that any malevolent super civilization would rapidly self-destruct as we may be in the process of doing ourselves so if we do have contact physical contact with aliens I think it will be benign my frivolous mind is much taken very intelligent beings reasonably near why have they not visited us well that's a very good

question let's throw it right across to Arthur CL there are literally dozens of answers to this they may have come in the remote past they may be visiting us every 10,000 years I mean the universe is a huge place and even there are fleets of survey ships going all over the cosmos we shouldn't expect visitors less than i' say every thousand years or so they may know all about us and they may have put a quarantine around our planet for pretty good reasons they may be totally uninterested us it may be so much higher that

they you know we just beneath their beneath contempt if you like that we don't you don't can speculate endlessly I think we should just wait and try and get more evidence maybe their space Popes are saying there's no intelligent life on Earth they may have received our television programs and decided that that is the case may I um attempt a different answer to uh to Stephen's question please do Carl um the uh the first large scale commercial broadcasting on the Earth was in the late 1940s uh so that's what 40 years ago so you must

imagine a spherical wave expanding out from the earth at the velocity of light which contains all the jewy programs of the late 1940s since then that expanding spherical wave containing the uh news of a developing civilization on Earth has traveled some 40 light years suppose that there are no civilizations closer than 40 light years perhaps they're not here because they don't know we are about just yet but uh in time the message gets to them and uh perhaps they send a little expedition to look us over I was delighted when I read that when space

probes went out out first of all you you put the figure of um a of a man and a woman on the outside so that any alien life would recognize what we looked like and then in a latest prob I think you put in an LP of Earth sounds with uh instructions in hand signals on on how to work the lp how do you think anybody would have reacted if in fact alien intelligent had heard this LP my guess is that it' be something like uh oh look another artifact from some extremely primitive civilization which

one is this uh but then some degree of thanks that uh we were thoughtful enough to send a message into the far future which could in no way benefit us uh certainly a selfless act and uh perhaps it would be recognized as a hopeful and optimistic gesture by a an emerging civilization just setting foot into the great galactic Wilderness yes Arthur I know what is going to happen to your voyagers Carl they'll be overtaken One Day by a terrestrial spaceship and brought back to the Smithsonian uh it's certainly technologically possible but I hope they let

it go on its original Mission now it's very nearly 20 years ago since man landed on the moon do you think that we've basically sto trying to get man any further is there any chance that another Neil arm strong will set foot on Mars in our lifetime the United States and the Soviet Union have managed to booby trap the planet with about 60,000 nuclear weapons With a Little Help from Britain France China and Israel uh a tiny fraction of those weapons is enough to uh destroy the participating Nations uh certainly the global civilization possibly and

uh the human species just maybe uh it is now time for the United States and the Soviet Union to demonstrate that they can undo this Spectre that they can demonstrate their ability to work together on high technology for peaceful uh hopeful purposes that carry us into a benign 21st century and uh that is why I support the idea of joint us Soviet cooperation in the exploration of Mars leading up to a uh an international manned and by the way womaned uh mission to the planet Americans and Soviets as representatives of the human species other nations

I presume would also be involved and then a glorious whatever it would be few month period in which Mars I I have a globe of it right next to me in which Mars would be explored there are hundreds for example hundreds of ancient river valleys uh on Mars Mars is today bone dry it was once much warmer much wetter much denser atmosphere much more earthlike what were those conditions like why did an earthlike Planet get converted into this deep Ice Age condition that uh Mars has has today and is there life there could there once

have been life are there fossil forms there are extraordinary enigmatic geological features on the planet what is there nature there is a huge amount of exploration to do uh and all of it every step that I've described could be before the television cameras of the world and we could all participate in such exploration is not a danger that that the human bits that we take with us will pollute and Destroy something enormously precious out there simply because we are so so inquisitive about it Arthur well as to the question should human beings go into to

the other planets I think the answer to that is well we could have stayed in Europe and explored America by robots it might have been certainly saved a lot of human lives but of course we didn't we went there lived in this new continent now admittedly Mars in fact none of the planets in the solar system is anything like as benign as United States or the other parts of this planet but one day people are going to call them home there will be martians one one day and they'll be our great grandchildren and they'll think

it Earth probably is a horrible place on which to live now as to whether we will pollute these environments yes to some extent of course colonization always involves the destruction of what was there first and I'm quite sure in The Next Century in fact already it started as a conference on the pollution of space planned in the in the United States in the very near future this is already a serious problem the near Earth's base but we have to control it I mean you C you have to cut down forests on this Earth to make

new cities and on on the moon I'm afraid one day we may have to abolish much of the lunar vacu vacuum and on Mars we may have to change the atmosphere but I do hope we will leave leave vits of the universe in a pristine condition but are we also going to have to change ourselves on Mars I mean are we going to have to evolve differently Mars will change Us in fact this is part of the evolutionary progress by going out into new environments by occupying new biological nites that is the way we progress

and discover the universe and explore and perhaps fulfill our destiny do you think that other planets might have uh the same kind of system in which there would be a Morality In which there would be people taking moral attitudes which may not necessarily be the same as ours of course well well all societies must have some moral structure I mean otherwise you just can't have a society there must be understand rules you way you behave to our neighbors and even if the societies consist of machines they must have a machine language so they can agree

to react together so morality in some way is essential and Universal now Professor Hawking in the very last paragraph of your book you say that if we discover a complete theory of of the universe then um it should in time be understandable in Broad principle to everyone and not just to a few scientists and when that happens all of us will be able to start discussing the why rather than the how and I quote if we find the answer to that it would be the ultimate Triumph of human reason for then we would know the

mind of God do you think that God can intervene in the universe as he wants or is God too Bound by the laws of science the question of whether God is bound by the laws of science is a bit like the question can God make paper stone that is so heavy that he cannot lift it I don't think it is very useful to speculate on what God might or might not be able to do rather we should examine what he actually does with the universe we live in all our observations suggest that it operates according

to well- defined laws these laws may have been ordained by God but it seems that he does not intervene in the universe to break the law at least not once it had set the universe going however until recently it was thought that the laws would necessarily break down at the beginning of the universe that would have meant that God would have had complete fr freed to choose How the Universe began in the last few years however we have realized that the laws of science May hold even at the beginning of time in that case God

would have had no Freedom the way the universe began would be determined by the laws of science well thank you very much and Carl San in in your introduction to the book you comment Ed on this you said this is also a book about God or perhaps about the absence of God because Hawking left nothing for a Creator to do now God of course means many things to many people what sort of God basically are we talking about when when we talk about reading the mind of God well I think that's uh that's an excellent

question and uh and I'd be most interested to uh to hear Steph Hawkings answer but just just to try to illuminate the the range of possibilities consider uh uh two Alternatives uh one is the uh the notion popular in the west uh of God as a sort of outsized elderly white male with a long white beard sitting in a throne in the sky and telling the fall of every Sparrow uh contrast that with uh the idea of God in the mind of let's say Spinosa or Einstein which was at least very close ly the sum

total of the laws of the universe uh now it would be Madness to deny that there are uh well-defined physical laws in the universe and if that's what you mean by God then there's no question that uh that God exists but it's a very remote God a what the french callant a do nothing King on the other hand the former model the one who intervenes daily uh for that there seems to be as Dr Hawkings said uh no evidence I think it is wise my my own personal feeling uh to be uh a little humble

on uh on such matters uh we must recognize that we are dealing with uh by definition the most difficult things uh to know the furthest from Human Experience and uh perhaps we will be able to penetrate a little way uh into these Mysteries I think Professor Hawking you'd like to come in here I use God in the same sense that Einstein did it is really the reason why the universe is as it is and why the universe exists at all can I ask Arthur Clark what he meant when you're alleged to have said to the

papal Nano I don't believe in God but I'm extremely interested in him well I guess I haven't placed my bet yet and um you know Steven's remarks and Carl's marks reminded me that this was said 200 years ago um when Napoleon I think was talking to llas who published his theory of the universe and Napoleon said God isn't in it and llas replied sir I have no need for that hypothesis do you think that the church is in fact beginning to recognize that it it may have to lose it priority its Eminence as the sole

Arbiter of of these matters and that science will be allowed to come in as an equal partner well the church is certainly when I the church the Roman Catholic Church you become very much more liberal I had the pleasure of giving a talk in the Vatican myself in the pontifical Academy of Science quite recently and met the pope and of course they're reinstating Galileo and so things are moving in fact are they moving backwards as well as forward Carl Sagan because I understand it in the earliest days of civilization then the priests were in fact

what we call the scientists the ones who could study astronomy and who could predict eclipses and things do you see the scientist coming back into an almost sedotal position like this or am I overstating it well I I uh I hope you're overstating it uh I think the essence of the scientific method is the willingness to uh to admit you're wrong the willingness to abandon ideas that don't work uh and the essence of religion is not to change uh anything that supposed truths are handed down by some revered figure and then no one is supposed

to make any uh any progress beyond that because all the truth is thought to be in hand I'm really talking about setting an agenda for the future uh my sense is that the scientific way of of thinking questioning uh some delicate mix of uh creative encouragement of new ideas and the most rigorous and skeptical scrutiny of new and old ideas uh I think that is the path to the Future not just for science but uh for all human institutions we have to be willing to challenge because we are in desperate need of change can I

put the same question to you Arthur Clark then politicians or priests are setting the agenda or scientists I'm very fond of quoting Pandit Nero on this when he once said that politics and religion are obsolete the time has come for Science and spirituality I hear from the clicking that Professor Hawking would like to come in I don't think that physics tell us how to behave to our neighbors ah well physics May determine who our neighbors are and what on what planets they live well you said science should be skeptical of politics don't you think ought

to be a little skeptical about science too I mean can we trust you guys I uh I think you should certainly be skeptical but uh my view is that there's no community of people on the planet more skeptical than science it's our stock in trade it's the lifeblood of our subject science is a self-correcting subject not like politics well politics are corrected by other forces um can I ask one question of of you all and that is the the question of creativity which fascinates me here we have three enormously creative people with enormously creative intellects

how in fact does it does it operate do you Arthur Clark do you sort of find um a problem that you'd like to work on and then look for a solution to it I'm not sure what my mechanism of creation is and I don't think I really want to know because I'm afraid if I discovered it I would like the centipede when it was asked how it walked just fell distracted in a ditch or a golfer when he's asked about his swing yes so you don't think about that um Carl San there is a serious

side to this well this issue of where creativity comes from is uh I I share your fascination with it um I don't think we understand very much about it I my practice is uh merely to to respect my unconscious mind who often is much wiser than than the conscious part of me and uh and pay attention to what it says uh uh in fact I think this is connected with that that delicate tension at the heart of the scientific method I talked about before the unconscious mind proposes a range of possibility of possibilities and the

conscious mind disposes that is Compares those ideas with the real world checks for internal inconsistencies uh and so on I think the creative process is a partnership uh between a conscious and an unconscious part of our of our minds at least that's how it seems to me I'd like to leave the last word on creativity in fact with Professor Steven Hawking just whenever you're ready sir I am just curious I want to find out how things work I follow my nose one thing leads to another and I don't know what I will find next now

I think I would like to retreat a little bit into poetry myself because it's nearly 150 years ago since Matthew Arnold wrote his Splendid poem the future but what was before us we know not and we know not what will succeed well perhaps if Professor Hawkings magnificent vision and curiosity is realized we'll have proved Matthew Arnold wrong before the 150 years are up gentlemen to all of you to Professor Steven Hawking to Dr Arthur C Clark to you Carl Sean in America our warmest thanks to all three of you and to all of you watching

good night [Music] for