Thoughts on the Book 'Brief Answers to the Big Questions' (Ch. 4)

One of the statements Hawking made was, “They offer to behave better or be kinder if only they can get an A-grade for a course or pass their driving test.” This statement stood out to me because I am definitely going to pray to God that I pass my IB exams and get my IB diploma because it is something I want very much; although, I am not sure what I would do as an exchange because I am honestly a pretty good person, but we can all improve.

Hawking made a couple of claims that I would like to expand upon. He stated, “As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place can cause a major change in another.” Hawking also postulates, “A butterfly flapping its wings in Australia can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather.” These statements stood out to me because of the movie Avengers: Endgame. The movie as well as the chapter expand upon the idea of quantum mechanics; in the movie, they use the quantum realm and Pym particles to travel back in time to bring back the dusted. Stephen Hawking talks about the Butterfly effect, but the movie completely disregards this whole concept and these problems were one the issues I had for this movie. For example, Gamora was pulled out of the past and into the present, which should have caused a huge butterfly effect especially within the Guardians of the Galaxy movies; how is it possible that her being brought to the future does not change the entirety of the last two Guardians movies. The same can be said for Nebula because she shot her past self, which arises the question of how did she not die, but also the same problem that bringing back Gamora has, which is that the entirety of the Guardians timeline would be different because Nebula and Gamora play such a huge role in them. According to the butterfly effect, everytime the Avengers went back in time the little things they did should have had huge effects on their main timelines. For example, Loki leaving with the Tesseract, Steve saying “Hail Hydra,” Tony meeting the younger version of his dad, 2023 Steve telling 2012 Steve that Bucky is alive, Frigga knowing what happens in the future, etc… These are all little things but in the long run the effects would have been huge, yet they did nothing to the main timeline. Also how does Steve staying back in time completely not change everything (and don’t get me started on how they ruined his character with that ending)? It makes no sense because if a butterfly flapping its wings can lead to it raining on another part of the world, then how does Steve staying back not have a huge effect on every single one of the Marvel movies. There is also the explanation they they just created different realities, but was it not their main timeline that they went back in time to not a random timeline from an alternate reality, so shouldn’t have all the effects been on the main timeline. Yes, I am aware this is a fictional movie, but they seem to not only disregard their own random rules of time travel, but the actual science for the sake of shock instead of having an actual cohesive plot. Hawking also exclaims, "All the evidence points to God being an inveterate gamble, who throws the dice on every possible occasion.” I found this statement to be really funny and I think it would be a pretty interesting idea to have a TV show centered around God rolling literal dice, which leads to important events happening on earth.