The Grand Design

by Stephen Hawking

quantum and classical physics are based on very different conceptions of physical reality.

According to Feynman, a system has not just one history but every possible history.

model-dependent realism. It is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth.

But the person who first explicitly and rigorously formulated the concept of laws of nature as we understand them was René Descartes (1596–1650).

is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

Galileo’s trial for heresy in 1633 for advocating the Copernican model, and for thinking “that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to the Holy Scripture.”

In 1992 the Roman Catholic Church finally acknowledged that it had been wrong to condemn Galileo.

An example that can help us think about issues of reality and creation is the Game of Life, invented in 1970 by a young mathematician at Cambridge named John Conway.