On the Prospects for a Unified Theory of Physics: A Belated Response to Stephen Hawking
Abstract
As theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking speculated on the prospects for a complete, unified theory in his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, he appeared to embrace both scientific realism and instrumentalism. Since these two views in the philosophy of science are inconsistent, over the course of the next twenty-two years, Hawking modified his views until he arrived at his model-dependent realism, but he never resolved the inconsistency completely. In this paper I explain the inconsistency, respond to Hawking’s criticism of philosophers of science and examine the key problems for a unified theory of physics.
Keywords: instrumentalism, scientific realism, model-dependent realism, unification of physics.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Pierre Duhem. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.1954. Translation from 2nd edition by Philip P. Wiener, originally published as La Théorie Physique: Son Objet, sa Structure. Paris: Marcel Rivière. 1914.
Stephen W. Hawking. Arrow of Time in Cosmology. Physical Review D. 32, 2489-2495. 1985.
Stephen W. Hawking. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam Books. 1988.
Stephen W. Hawking. Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. New York: Bantam Books.1993.
Stephen W. Hawking. The Universe in a Nutshell. New York: Bantam Books. 2001.
S. Hawking, R. Laflamme, G. W. Lyons. Origin of Time Asymmetry. Physical Review D, 47, 5342-5356. 1993.
Stephen W. Hawking, Roger Penrose. The Nature of Space and Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996.
Stephen W. Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life. New York: Bantam Press. 2010.
Werner Heisenberg. Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1958.
Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1962.
Leemon B. McHenry. Review of A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, by Stephen W. Hawking. The Review of Metaphysics, March, 626-628. 1989.
Leemon B. McHenry. The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2015.
Plato, Timaeus, The Dialogues of Plato. Translation by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1953.
Karl Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books. 1959.
Karl Popper. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1972.
W. V. O. Quine. On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World. Erkenntnis, 9, 313–328.1975.
Mendel Sachs. On Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and the Present State of Physics. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 44 (3), 543-547.1993.
Steven Weinberg. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Vintage Books. 1994.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23756/sp.v13i2.1720
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2026 Leemon Benton McHenry
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Science & Philosophy - Journal of Epistemology, Science and Philosophy. ISSN 2282-7757; eISSN 2282-7765.