For those who have spent the past few weeks on a caving holiday or who have been on a visit to the glaciers of Svalbard, the news that Stephen Hawking has published a new book — his first in a decade — may come as a surprise. For the rest of humanity, however, the information will by now seem as stale as a day-old pizza. Certainly, the blizzard of front-page stories that has greeted publication of the first extracts from The Grand Design has been extraordinary and, over the past three weeks, has given the scientist the kind of coverage that modern authors would sell their souls for.
“Hawking: God did not create universe,” the London Times announced on its front page, a splash story that was followed up for several days with as much furious religious reaction as the paper’s writers could muster. Other media outlets followed suit — “Bang goes God, says Hawking,” a tabloid announced — while rabbis, archbishops and religious historians filled letters pages and comment slots with waves of apoplectic outrage.
It has been a dispiriting experience. Setting religion against science, as the media has quite deliberately done in this case, achieves little for our attempts to understand the complexities of modern cosmology, the specific aim of Hawking and Mlodinow’s book. Worse, the furor suggests that at the beginning of the 21st century, in our apparently rational, secular society, the declaration by a leading scientist that God was not involved in the universe’s creation is deemed to be newsworthy and deserving of front-page headlines in national newspapers.
Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Like most other physicists, Hawking has never expressed a need for God in his equations and has only made previous mentions to tease his readers. Fortunately, most of them have had the wit to appreciate this point. In fact, there is hardly a mention of a deity in The Grand Design. In the opening pages, there are a few mentions of clerical attempts in the middle ages to make philosophical sense of the heavens and that is about it — until we reach the last chapter.
“Spontaneous creation is
the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking and Mlodinow announce at this point. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
And that is just about it. The rest of the book is an attempt to account for the strange nature of reality as revealed by astronomers and physicists; to reconcile the apparent absurdities of quantum mechanics with the mind-stretching features of special and general relativity; and to explain why the forces of nature are apparently fine-tuned to allow the evolution of complex creatures such as ourselves. As Hawking and Mlodinow note, only the tiniest altering of the constants that control nuclear synthesis in stars would produce a universe with no carbon and no oxygen and therefore no humans.
“Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alternation,” they state. “That is not easily explained, and raises the natural question of why it is that way.” The answer, the authors say, lies with M-theory. (The M apparently stands for “master, miracle, or mystery.” The authors are unsure which.) The vital point is that M-theory allows for the existence of 11 dimensions of space-time that contains not just vibrating strings of matter but also “point particles, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional blobs and other objects that are more difficult to picture.” Simple, really.
Crucially the laws of M-theory allow for an unimaginably large number of different universes. Thus we exist because the laws of our particular universe just happen to be tuned to the exact parameters that permit the existence of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and other key atoms and which also generate laws that allow these entities to interact in ways that build up complex chemical combinations. Other universes are not so lucky.
M-theory is the unified theory of physics that Einstein was hoping to find, state the authors, and if it is confirmed by observation, it will be the successful conclusion to a search that was begun by the ancient Greeks when they started to puzzle about the nature of
reality. “We will have found the grand design,” Hawking and Mlodinow conclude.
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