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The Grand Design
by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow
by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow
I have a feeling that the publishing industry is milking Stephen Hawking. There was a time when we had a dashing physicist named Richard Feynman who used LSD and played banjo in a strip club. The naked pole dancers didn’t distract him from formulating quantum electrodynamics. He was quite a genius, and he was all over the place with his talks and popular books. But he’s dead. Now Stephen Hawking seems to be the coolest physicist around. He’s paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, and he speaks through a voice synthesizer by twitching a tiny working cheek muscle against a screen to pick up a displayed word. How cool is that! So he’s become quite a celebrity, and he fully deserves it. The public is fascinated with him. But that doesn’t mean a whole lot for the quality of his books. I’ve read better pop-physics books than this one. Besides, I didn’t see anything new here.
This book got more publicity because it’s supposed to take on the question of God. It’s no secret that the great biologists and physicists tend to be atheists. That’s a very telling fact. But having acknowledged that, I don’t see a point in a physicist trying to “disprove” God through physics. Upon being asked by Napoleon where God fits in his physics, Laplace is reported to having said: “Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis.” Science, by definition, does not and cannot use the God hypothesis. I don’t see why it should get into the business of rejecting that hypothesis. Those who are inclined to reject God can point to the findings of biology and cosmology for support. But that is quite different from a physicist setting out to refute God based on physics.
As for the God-rejecting physics – it can be summarized in two points: 1) While no individual physical object can appear out of nothing, an entire universe can. This is because the sum-total of the energy in the universe is zero. 2) There are almost an infinite number of universes popping out of nothing into existence. One of them, like the one where we live, can, by mere chance, have the right properties (laws and constants of physics) for the emergence of starts and planets and eventually life. The book goes into explaining the physics behind these two claims. Unless you’re a physicist as good as Hawking, there’s nothing you can say about his physics.
This book got more publicity because it’s supposed to take on the question of God. It’s no secret that the great biologists and physicists tend to be atheists. That’s a very telling fact. But having acknowledged that, I don’t see a point in a physicist trying to “disprove” God through physics. Upon being asked by Napoleon where God fits in his physics, Laplace is reported to having said: “Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis.” Science, by definition, does not and cannot use the God hypothesis. I don’t see why it should get into the business of rejecting that hypothesis. Those who are inclined to reject God can point to the findings of biology and cosmology for support. But that is quite different from a physicist setting out to refute God based on physics.
As for the God-rejecting physics – it can be summarized in two points: 1) While no individual physical object can appear out of nothing, an entire universe can. This is because the sum-total of the energy in the universe is zero. 2) There are almost an infinite number of universes popping out of nothing into existence. One of them, like the one where we live, can, by mere chance, have the right properties (laws and constants of physics) for the emergence of starts and planets and eventually life. The book goes into explaining the physics behind these two claims. Unless you’re a physicist as good as Hawking, there’s nothing you can say about his physics.
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That is certainly not a strong point, but no one has the right to sue him for that because every one is free to have his own opinion and to express that. We can have a dialogue with that person.
I think that this book is good for those who want to have a general idea of science and physics, especially the ones who are not related to physics, but it is not a book which "proves" that God doesn't exist.