British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking drew an audience of more than 9,000 to the Huntsman Center at the University of Utah Monday evening, astonishing them with a glimpse of an unpredictable universe and delighting them with his wry sense of humor.
Hansen Planetarium officials reported that Hawking's fiancee and nurse, Elaine Mason, said this was far greater than his previous record audience, 4,000 people at Berke-ley, Calif., a few years ago. The planetarium sponsored the visit to help complete a film about cosmology and Hawking, "Fate of the Universe."Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease, has paralyzed the 53-year-old Hawking so that he must use a motorized wheelchair to get around and a computer-controlled voice synthesizer to speak. But he teaches, writes best-selling books about cosmology and and carries out research as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, England.
At a reception before the lecture, held in the U.'s Museum of Fine Arts, Peter Wehinger, an astronomy professor at Arizona State University, asked Hawking if he thought there was a black hole in the galaxy called M87.
"That is a pretty good bet," Hawking replied, using his computer to scroll across rows and columns of words, selecting each word of his reply.
"Not that I'm a betting man. I always lose," he added.
The theme of betting came up again and again during Hawking's lecture, which was keyed to the reaction Albert Einstein had to the uncertainty inherent in quantum mechanics. Einstein rejected this idea because he disliked the notion of randomness in the universe.
The uncertainty principle means it is impossible to know both the exact location and the speed of a subatomic particle. An overall combination of the two could be known, but not both factors.
"His views were summed up in his famous phrase, `God does not play dice,' " Hawking told the crowd in the Huntsman Center.
Einstein hoped there was an underlying certainty even if man couldn't discover it. However, Einstein was proven wrong on that, Hawking said. An experiment by aBritish physicist, John Bell - who died recently - disproved the idea of these hidden variables.
"Thus it seems that indeed God is bound by the uncertainty principle and cannot know both the position and the speed of the particle. So God does play dice with the universe.
"All the evidence points to Him being an inveterate gambler who throws the dice at every possible occasion."
The uncertainty principle left us knowing half of what had been believed possible. It still seemed possible to know a figure that rep-re-sen-ted the combination of a particle's speed and position.
Then Hawking himself threw a monkey wrench into the deterministic universe. Discovering what is now called Hawking radiation, he showed that not even that much could be known.
Hawking radiation is the scattering of radiation that seems to come from black holes. Large black holes are collapsed stars that create intense gravitational fields so strong that not even light can escape them.
Hawking found that black holes can dissipate energy and so they eventually will disappear. Yet no information can ever emerge into our dimension about anything that fell into a black hole, even after it evaporates.
"This loss of information will mean that we can predict even less than we thought on the basis of quantum theory. . . .
"Thus it seems Einstein was doubly wrong when he said God does not play dice. Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
Hawking said some scientists have not learned the lesson of history, have not accepted that the universe isn't totally predictable.
"It continues to surprise us," his mechanical voice intoned.
"One might not think it matters very much if determinism broke down near black holes. We are almost certainly at least a few light years of any size."
But under extreme conditions, as prevailed during the earliest moments of Creation, or in high-energy particle collisions, there could be significant loss of information. This would lead to unpredictability in the evolution of the universe, he said.
"God still has a few tricks up his sleeve," he concluded.
On Tuesday, Dave Brenna, the planetarium's administrative director, said the Huntsman center ticket machine broke down and the final figure was uncertain, but it looks like attendance was more than 9,000. Tickets were priced at $12, $9 and $6.
Diane Beam, the planetarium staff education specialist who is overseeing the film project, said Hawking was having a great time in Utah. At a reception at La Caille restaurant, he got a kick out of the peacocks and other birds singing all evening.