Some of the things I overheard at Stephen Hawking's 70th
birthday conference did make me wonder whether I hadn't got the
wrong building and stumbled in on a sci-fi convention. "The
state of the multiverse". "The Universe is simple but strange".
"The future for intelligent life is potentially infinite". And —
excuse me — "the Big Bang was just the decay of our parent
vacuum"?! A traditional view of science holds that every system
— including ourselves — is no more than the sum of its parts. To
understand it, all you have to do is take it apart and see
what's happening to the smallest constituents. But the
mathematician and cosmologist George Ellis disagrees. He
believes that complexity can arise from simple components and
physical effects can have non-physical causes, opening a door
for our free will to make a difference in a physical world. Most
of us think that we have the capacity to act freely. Our sense
of morality, our legal system, our whole culture is based on the
idea that there is such a thing as fre