back to hawking: "the unobserved past is indefinite." "Observations you make on a system in the present affect its past." ask yourself, for example, what experimental results could show that 'the unobserved past is indefinite.' i would think, for example, that the idea that the past is in continual flux would make it impossible to do any sort of experiment: the conditions under which it was performed won't stay still for a moment. what did you just do in the lab or just observe? there are many correct answers to this, as many as there are future reinterpretations. i wonder whether it could turn out, for example, that george washington wasn't the first president. or whether it might keep changing back and forth, etc. i don't mean that we could revise our beliefs. i mean can it actually cease and resume being true that he was? somewhere back there, gw is flickering in and out of existence.

well i suppose this assertion applies only to the 'unobserved' past. this might have two senses: something past that was not observed in the past is indefinite (which i'm reading as a third truth value between true and false?). for example, it is indefinite - it neither true nor false - that there was a universe a billion years ago. or perhaps the idea is that something asserted about the past now is indefinite unless that past is observable now. however, nothing past is observable now. follow either of these ideas for awhile and you'll realize you just got lost.

and you'll realize that you've lost entirely the pastness of the past. to repeat, what we have here is hegelian absolute idealism or something, and the continual revision of the past is also a doctrine of pomo narrative theory (which really derives from hegel). or maybe it's like the pragmatist approach to history (c.i. lewis's, for example): to say that p is true is to say it will guide us fruitfully in the future. so the claim that gw existed, for example, is a claim about the future. ok, well, knock yourself out while i try to knock yourself down. only don't try to tell me this is "science."

it's a little hard for me to see where the math comes in, but i do want to point out that it is indeterminate whether hawking has actually ever done any mathematics and whether it turned out right when he did.

in some ways this is a commonplace. for example, it became the case, say, in 1870, that manet's work of the 1850s anticipated impressionism. that wasn't true of manet's paintings in the 1850s, but it was true of manet's paintings of the 1850s in the 1870s. ok, is this the sort of thing y'all have in mind? 

anyway, philosophy is not dead as long as physicists are engaging in the most rank and post-empirical philosophical speculation. when rorty and folks said philosophy was dead, they at least tried to stop doing it. hawking, though, doesn't really have the training to know whether philosophy is dead, or to kill it. certainly you can't kill it by putting forth a theory of truth, "solving" the problem of skepticism, or describing the cosmic order of the universe.