The Grand Design

The Grand Design
Stephen Hawking
Leonard Mlodinow
Kindle Edition



Although Hawking's name features more prominently on the cover than Mlodinow's, I cannot help fantasizing about how the work division was done. It is not difficult to imagine that Hawking is basically the author of the last chapter, which carries the same title as the book itself, while Mlodinow did the hard work of writing all the other 7 chapters. Hawking was probably also the guiding hand that made sure the thread developed in these initial chapters would carefully lead the reader to his own conclusion. And, of course, he's probably responsible for the typically Pythonesque humor sprinkled throughout the text.

The first chapters take the reader through an accelerated account of the progress of humankind's understanding of nature. It starts with the Greek thinkers, skips the middle ages, jumps to Copernicus and Galileo, follows to Newton and finally gets to Einstein and his theory of General Relativity. It also covers the development of quantum physics in the early decades of the 20th century and the fruitless attempts to unite it peacefully with GR. Finally the authors tell how this lead to string theory and later M-Theory and why it remains the best candidate to explain nature at a deeper level. The facts and theories are up to date (as of 2010), but there's not much new material there, nothing that a reader of "The Universe in a Nutshell" already didn't know.

Although these chapters cover standard material as seen in other popular science books, there are two things that make them worth reading. First is the concept of model-dependent realism, which is a retreat from the popular credo of the 80's and 90's in a Theory of Everything. Instead, this concept admits that reality cannot be modeled by a single theory but needs a family of them to model different aspects. The second thing is the more philosophical slant of the text. While most scientists would not like to address these issues, leaving them to philosophers, the authors state right at the beginning of the book that they want to know the answer to these questions:

- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Why do we exist?
- Why this particular set of laws (of physics) and not some other?

As you can see, these are grandiose questions (could they be more so?) and I won't spoil your pleasure of reading this nice book to find the answers yourself. However, as you might suspect, they don't involve the concept of God and none of them is 42!

One final comment about how I "weighed" the chapters. I read this book on a Kindle and I like to use its ability to highlight pieces of text. This is basically what you would do with a yellow pen in a dead-tree book, with the advantage that you can see all of your highlights in a single place if you want. In the initial chapters I kept an average of 2 or 3 highlights per chapter. However, when I reached the "Grand Design" chapter in the end, I found myself marking almost everything. This showed me that this was really a different chapter, with much more new content than the others.

Whatever your background, I think everybody is interested in the profound questions that this books addresses. The answers that Hawking and Mlodinow give are not easy to swallow, but they are courageous and deserve careful consideration.