The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose - and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago. Against the background of new cosmological theories, Hawking defends Bohr's thesis that quantum theory has no radical incompleteness. Those who think it incomplete are wrongly treating its formulas as describing reality, rather than as predictive tools. Like Einstein, Penrose disagrees. Things then get somewhat tense. Hawking uses terms like 'magic' in dismissing theories which Penrose brought to the general public in The Emperor's New Mind. Penrose throws some courteous cold water on the universe-creating mechanism made famous by Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

LRB 1 August 1996 | PDF Download