The story set off a round of virtual chest-thumping. One writer said it raised the "thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator."
Another site, "Creation Revolution," wrote a gloating piece under the headline, "Cosmologist forced into 'in the beginning.' "
The New Scientist story did imply that the physicists were bumping up against the Almighty. It even quoted Hawking seeming to admit that science can never explain the beginning of the universe without God: "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God."
So are creationists rushing in where cosmologists fear to tread?
Hawking is inaccessible - his neurological condition, ALS, makes all but the slowest communication impossible - but I was able to reach the two scientists accused of coming to the conference bearing "the worst presents ever."
One of them, MIT cosmologist Alan Guth, said he did not get the impression that Hawking or anyone else was giving up on a scientific explanation for the origin of the universe. Guth certainly is not, and he thought Hawking's God quote was probably referring not to the state of cosmology but to some specific ideas.
Guth said Hawking has consistently embraced a picture of the universe that has no beginning, despite its apparent expansion from a big bang. As Hawking described in A Brief History of Time, there's a way to think about space and time in a configuration so that the beginning of the universe is like the South Pole - you can't go any farther south.
That defies intuition but it's oddly consistent with the laws of physics.
