Why Hawking and holes in space are only half the baffle

BRITISH physicist Stephen Hawking is working on an answer to the ultimate questions.

Sadly, this does not mean we will soon know why the sock-sucking black hole in the washing machine takes one of a pair.

Or, if men are from Mars and women from Venus, how come we all ended up here with the former refusing to ask directions and the latter unable to read maps.

In a recently publicised speech delivered at the University of California at Berkeley last year, Hawking said science was getting closer to explaining where the universe came from and where it was going.

This may not daunt people who read - and understood - the learned professor's Brief History of Time (how are you both?), which proved that the passage of the hours could be straight or circular, fast or slow.

(It's common sense, isn't it? After all, what else could explain why it took 20 years to read a 200-page paperback?)

But, for the rest of us, the ideas he expresses in equations that look like a Macquarie Bank superannuation strategy are a bit hard to get our heads around, in this or any other dimension.

For example, among cosmologists, the suggestion the universe, or at least this one, has a beginning is the axiomatic equivalent of arguing Richmond will not make the eight until light that left Andromeda in the year the club last won the flag shines over Punt Road.

You can't prove it by empirical observation but, then again, Mac Bank has never tried to turn the Tigers into a unit trust.

It all goes to show how complicated cosmology is.

Scientists with brains the size of only slightly smaller planets than Hawking's have ideas about what is in the universe, as opposed to what is on the other side or was there before everything got going.

They tell us there are galaxies that are expanding and imploding, heating and cooling. Some galaxies are racing away from each other while others are cuddling closer. And while nobody has noticed constellations dancing the hokey-pokey it is only a matter of months or light years until they do.

Then there are black holes, which apparently are dead stars packed together so densely that light can't escape their gravity.Unless they are holes in space, which itself being a void makes them absences inemptiness.

They are nothing like wormholes, which apparently are tunnels through space-time, (so handy when you need to escape from Emperor Palpatine). But before you hide in one, be warned: you could end up in another universe. Unless you run into dark matter, which apparently clutters up pretty much everywhere, everywhere.

Not that anybody knows what it is made of, what with it not emitting or reflecting electromagnetic radiation.

But it has to be out there because, if it's not, all sorts of other theories will have big holes (worm or otherwise).

Now, if this seems unimaginable, don't worry. The idea of other universes is no more alarming than Hawking's confidence that anybody who works out a way to combine quantum theory with general relativity will be on their way to explaining why the universe is the way it is, when it started and when it will end. Makes you wonder why you never thought of doing it for yourself.

You can argue that this is all ever so intellectually elegant but baseless speculation, that we have as much evidence of the way the universe works as people in the Middle Ages who were sure the sun revolved around us.

But it is a fair bet that Hawking knows what he is talking about.

It's just that in a universe where science and mathematics are used to interpret evidence that is occurring in galaxies far, far away and that no one will see with their own eyes (not unless somebody returns the keys for the Millennium Falcon), he may as well explain it all in Klingon. And hope the explanation does not go down a wormhole.

Cosmology makes sense, Jim, just not as we know it.