The Grand Design (2010) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

Summary edit see section history

People edit see section history

• Richard Feynman: The authors use his formulation to describe quantum mechanics.
• Albert Einstein: His Unified Field Theory may not actually exist, according to the authors.
• Sir Isaac Newton: His Laws of Motion and Law of Gravity play a part in the discussion.
• James Clerk Maxwell: He described how electricity and magnetism are related, and formulated the important laws of electromagnetism.
• Aristotle: Add a description of this character.
• Descartes
• Conway
• Hoyle
• Kepler
• Friedmann
• Laplace
• Claudius Ptolemy

Quotes edit see section history

• “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

  -Hawking and Mlodinow

• “In our quest to find the laws that govern the universe we have formulated a number of theories or models, such as the four-element theory, the Ptolemaic model, the phlogiston theory, the big bang theory, and so on. Regarding the laws that govern the universe, what we can say is this: There seems to be no single mathematical model or theory that can describe every aspect of the universe. Instead, there seems to be the network of theories, With each theory or model, our concepts of reality and of the fundamental constituents of the universe have changed.”

  -Hawking and Mlodinow

• “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “The naive view of reality therefore is not compatible with modern physics.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “To understand the universe at the deepest level, we need to know not only how the universe behaves, but why.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “The idea arose that nature follows consistent principles that could be deciphered. And so began the long process of replacing the notion of the reign of gods with the concept of a universe that is governed by laws of nature, and created according to a blueprint we could someday learn to read.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “Anaximander (ca. 610 BC–ca. 546 BC), a friend and possibly a student of Thales, argued that since human infants are helpless at birth, if the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not have survived.”

  Anaximandre

• “The revolutionary idea that we are but ordinary inhabitants of the universe, not special beings distinguished by existing at its center, was first championed by Aristarchus (ca. 310 BC–ca. 230 BC), one of the last of the Ionian scientists.”

  Aristarchus

• “The Ionians were but one of many schools of ancient Greek philosophy, each with different and often contradictory traditions. Unfortunately, the Ionians’ view of nature—that it can be explained through general laws and reduced to a simple set of principles—exerted a powerful influence for only a few centuries. One reason is that Ionian theories often seemed to have no place for the notion of free will or purpose, or the concept that gods intervene in the workings of the world. These were startling omissions as profoundly unsettling to many Greek thinkers as they are to many people today.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws, imagine convincing an asteroid to move along an ellipse.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “The notion that the laws of nature had to be intentionally obeyed reflects the ancients’ focus on why nature behaves as it does, rather than on how it behaves.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”

  Alexander Pope

• “If nature is governed by laws, three questions arise: What is the origin of the laws? Are there any exceptions to the laws, i.e., miracles? Is there only one set of possible laws?”

  Stephen Hawking

• “Recognizing this, Napoleon is said to have asked Laplace how God fit into this picture. Laplace replied: “Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis.””

  Laplace

• “It 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.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “But different theories can successfully describe the same phenomenon through disparate conceptual frameworks. In fact, many scientific theories that had proven successful were later replaced by other, equally successful theories based on wholly new concepts of reality.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “A model is a good model if it: Is elegant, contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements, agrees with and explains all existing observations, makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “According to quantum physics, no matter how much information we obtain or how powerful our computing abilities, the outcomes of physical processes cannot be predicted with certainty because they are not determined with certainty.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “In fact, if general relativity were not taken into account in GPS satellite navigation systems, errors in global positions would accumulate at a rate of about ten kilometers each day!”

  Stephen Hawking

• “In fact, the term “big bang” was coined in 1949 by Cambridge astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who believed in a universe that expanded forever, and meant the term as a derisive description.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “Hundreds of years ago people thought the earth was unique, and situated at the center of the universe. Today we know there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, a large percentage of them with planetary systems, and hundreds of billions of galaxies.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “The turning point in the scientific rejection of a human-centered universe was the Copernican model of the solar system, in which the earth no longer held a central position.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “In the ensuing centuries the more we discovered about the universe, the more it seemed ours was probably just a garden-variety planet.”

  Stephen Hawking

• “Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God.”

  Stephen Hawking

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.

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• Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history.

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• It 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.

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• 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.

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• There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to interpret modern science.

  Highlighted by 613 Kindle customers

• A model is a good model if it: Is elegant Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements Agrees with and explains all existing observations Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.

  Highlighted by 589 Kindle customers

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

  Highlighted by 576 Kindle customers

• If nature is governed by laws, three questions arise: What is the origin of the laws? Are there any exceptions to the laws, i.e., miracles? Is there only one set of possible laws?

  Highlighted by 487 Kindle customers

• Because it is so impractical to use the underlying physical laws to predict human behavior, we adopt what is called an effective theory. In physics, an effective theory is a framework created to model certain observed phenomena without describing in detail all of the underlying processes.

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• To paraphrase Einstein, a theory should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.

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Organizations edit see section history

• CERN: The European Organization for Nuclear Research.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• Cosmology: The study of the Universe and humanity's place in it.
• Quantum Mechanics: Quantum mechanics is a body of scientific principles describing the behavior of matter and its interactions on the atomic and subatomic scales. ~Wikipedia
• M-Theory: In non-technical terms, M-theory presents an idea about the basic substance of the universe. ~Wikipedia
• Multiverse: The multiverse (or meta-universe, metaverse) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including the historical universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. ~Wikipedia
• Unified Field Theory: First proposed by Albert Einstein, Unified field theory, or grand unified theory, or "the theory of everything," is an attempt to consolidate the laws of physics into a single framework. ~Wikipedia

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Physics: Describe this theme.

Series & Lists edit see section history

List the series to which this book belongs.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Stephen W. Hawking (Author)
2. Leonard Mlodinow (Author)

Other Contributors:

1. Simon M. Sullivan (Designer)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: QC20.5 .H379 2010
• Dewey: 523

Notes for Parents edit see section history

The complexity of the topic at hand is best suited for adult readers.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Professional & Technical › Professional Science › Astronomy › Cosmology
• Books › Professional & Technical › Professional Science › Astronomy › Astrophysics & Space Science
• Books › Science › Astronomy › Cosmology
• Books › Science › Physics › Cosmology
• Books › Science › Astronomy › Astrophysics & Space Science
• Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Spirituality › Atheism

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Official Website of Professor Stephen Hawking

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history

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