The Grand Design is a popular-science book written by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and published by Bantam Books in 2010. The book examines the history of scientific knowledge about the universe and explains eleven-dimensional M-theory. The authors of the book point out that a Unified Field Theory (a theory, based on an early model of the universe, proposed by Albert Einstein and other physicists) may not exist.
It argues that invoking God is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe, and that the Big Bang is a consequence of the laws of physics alone. In response to criticism, Hawking said: "One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary." When pressed on his own religious views by the 2010 Channel 4 documentary Genius of Britain, he clarified that he did not believe in a personal God.
Published in the United States on September 7, 2010, the book became the number one bestseller on Amazon.com just a few days after publication. It was published in the United Kingdom on September 9, 2010, and became the number two bestseller on Amazon.co.uk on the same day. It topped the list of adult non-fiction books of The New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list in September–October 2010.
Synopsis
The book examines the history of scientific knowledge about the universe. It starts with the Ionian Greeks, who claimed that nature works by laws, and not by the will of the gods. It later presents the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, who advocated the concept that the Earth is not located in the center of the universe.
It has tried to explain the topics in an easier manner. Many examples related from daily life, mythology and history have been taken to explain, such as- Viking Mythology about Skoll and Hati, movie "The Matrix", Ptolemaic universe.
The authors then describe the theory of quantum mechanics using, as an example, the probable movement of an electron around a room. The presentation has been described as easy to understand by some reviewers, but also as sometimes "impenetrable," by others.
The central claim of the book is that the theory of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity together help us understand how universes could have formed out of nothing.
The authors write:
The authors explain, in a manner consistent with M-theory, that as the Earth is only one of several planets in our Solar System, and as our Milky Way galaxy is only one of many galaxies, the same may apply to our universe itself: that is, our universe may be one of a huge number of universes.
The book concludes with the statement that only some universes of the multiple universes (or multiverse) support life forms and that we are located in one of those universes. The laws of nature that are required for life forms to exist appear in some universes by pure chance , Hawking and Mlodinow explain (see Anthropic principle).
Reactions
Positive reactions
Evolutionary biologist and advocate for atheism Richard Dawkins welcomed Hawking's position and said that "Darwinism kicked God out of biology but physics remained more uncertain. Hawking is now administering the coup de grace."
Theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll, writing in The Wall Street Journal, described the book as speculative but ambitious: "The important lesson of The Grand Design is not so much the particular theory being advocated but the sense that science may be able to answer the deep 'Why?' questions that are part of fundamental human curiosity."
Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, in his article "Our Spontaneous Universe", wrote that "there are remarkable, testable arguments that provide firmer empirical evidence of the possibility that our universe arose from nothing. ... If our universe arose spontaneously from nothing at all, one might predict that its total energy should be zero. And when we measure the total energy of the universe, which could have been anything, the answer turns out to be the only one consistent with this possibility. Coincidence? Maybe. But data like this coming in from our revolutionary new tools promise to turn much of what is now metaphysics into physics. Whether God survives is anyone's guess."
James Trefil, a professor of physics at George Mason University, said in his Washington Post review: "I've waited a long time for this book. It gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology without a single equation. The reader will be able to get through it without bogging down in a lot of technical detail and will, I hope, have his or her appetite whetted for books with a deeper technical content. And who knows? Maybe in the end the whole multiverse idea will actually turn out to be right!"