The Grand Design

Title: The Grand Design – New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life

Author: Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

Publisher: Bantam 2010 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-593-05830-5

Pages: 186

Stephen Hawking doesn’t need an introduction in the world of popular science. No other book has seen such tremendous success as his A Brief History of Time, which spawned a genre of publications in its own right. Nobody thought that writing a science book would turn out to be a lucrative profession until that work turned everyone’s heads in a single stroke. Hawking shot to global fame and is popularly considered as the greatest living scientist, no doubt sympathetically influenced by the chronic disease afflicting the author. The Grand Design is a good work on the lines of the much successful earlier works of Hawking, but definitely not matching the purpose and clarity of the others. It pours over the quest for a unified theory, the unending journey of mankind to find reason behind the way things are. It follows the beaten path, with a survey of ancient Greek thinkers, going straight to renaissance Europe, enumerating the progress in unification of forces of nature, quantum theories and ends with speculations on the perceived design in the origin of the universe.

Ancient Greeks, starting probably from Thales speculated that the universe acts the way it does based on some natural laws. Existence of God was not a criterion in that philosophy. Aristarchus proposed that humans don’t occupy a unique place in the universe as claimed by the religiously minded and Anaximander formulated the beginnings of evolution. With the fading away of the classical age and advent of middle ages, religion overshadowed science. Scientific enquiries were sometimes brutally put down, as with the case of Bishop Tempier of Paris, acting upon the advise of Pope John XXI, published a list of 219 errors or heresies that must be condemned with death, one of them being the notion that nature follows laws. Interestingly, the Pope himself fell victim to those laws – the law of gravity – a few months later, when the roof of his palace fell in on him. Descartes used the term ‘Laws of Nature’ for the first time. Three questions arose for the philosophers of that time, 1) what is the origin of the laws, 2) are there any exceptions to the law, i.e, miracles, 3) is there any one set of possible laws? If we include God as the answer to the first, the question becomes more mysterious, without being answered. For the second question, the answer is no, based on scientific determinism put forward by Simon de Laplace in 18^th century. All the thinkers have maintained that the answer is in the affirmative for the third question.

Hawking argues that there is no reality independent of the observer. We adopt a model-dependent realism, the idea that a theory or world picture is a model and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. The properties of a good model are, 1) it should be elegant, 2) it contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements, 3) agrees with and explains all existing observations and 4) makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out (p.51). A particular model can’t explain all aspects of the universe. In some cases, conflicting theories may have to be combined to explain the characteristics of nature, like wave-particle duality of light. For reflection, refraction and photoelectric effect, the corpuscular theory of light provides the answer, while for interference, the wave theory is the only refuge. Thus, each theory is good at predicting a subset of all possible occurrences. This is an inherent nature of model-dependent realism.

Everything went well until scientific determinism itself was put in doubt while accepting quantum mechanics as the theory of the future in 20^th century. Quantum physics seems to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws. Instead, it is a new rule, stating that given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the possibilities of various futures. Every particle, going from one position to the next, takes on all possible routes, signifying infinite trajectories and futures. This aspect differentiates it from the classical theory, according to which the universe began at a single point in spacetime and had only a unique past. The author then purports to spell briefly on the unification of forces, which are four in number. The first integration came in the 19^th century when electricity and magnetism was combined in a single theory by James Clark Maxwell, then came the electroweak theory of Abdus Salam and Weinberg combining electromagnetism with the weak nuclear interactions. Every classical theory was complemented with a quantum mechanical description, as in the Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) by Richard Feynman. Similarly, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) was put forward to describe the strong force in a quantum way. Grand Unified Theory (GUT) was unsuccessful in effectively combining electroweak and strong forces. String theory was formulated in its wake to supply this deficit, but was found to have some logical flaws, around 1994. M-theory was forwarded as the alternative, the letter ‘M’ standing for master, mystery or membrane! Hawking seems to lend his weight behind this theory, which require 11 spatial dimensions and postulated 10⁵⁰⁰ universes with different laws and histories.

The Big Bang is assumed to be the origin of the universe. In fact, all classical theories, including Einstein’s general relativity, breaks down at this point. Since the universe was very tiny at around this time, it may be treated as a quantum event. But, quantum events have all possible futures, and in reaching the present state, it might have travelled through all possible time paths, called Feynman some-over histories. We happen to live in a universe where every parameter is just right for intelligent life to evolve. A change of 0.5% in the strong nuclear force or 4% in electromagnetism would destroy all carbon and oxygen atoms, along with all life, as we know it. But this fine tuning of parameters does not imply that there was a creator or designer who fiddled with the knobs. In an infinite variety of universes (multiverse) ours is unique in the sense that the settings were just right for life to emerge. But how did the process was set in motion in the first place? Hawking’s answer seems to be a little stretched. Particles cannot be created in the local spacetime because energy is conserved and creating matter spends energy. But, the universe, taken as a whole displays a balanced state of energy. So, whole universes can be generated in a quantum ripple, as the total energy of the universe is still conserved, the net energy again being zero. But the argument, sadly, is unconvincing.

As is usual with works of Hawking, the book is fine in the quality of pages, printing and illustrations. The layout is commendable, with a lot of colour illustrations making the arguments come alive in front of our eyes. A glossary is included, but seems to be an afterthought as it lacks depth. There are no new concepts explained in the book, lacks direction in most places and is quite unattractive when taken as a whole. The forced humour introduced deliberately in several places is unappealing. The authors don’t do justice to the grand title by fumbling about in the crucial explanatory stages of the grand design. In the end, one wonders what prompted Hawking to bring out such a book as this. However, if you are new to books on popular physics, then this book is a real starter.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star