Stephen Hawking: The Grand Design

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Guruprasad Rao K S

Vice President - Operations

One of my recent reads happened to come from Stephen Hawking, maybe the Amazon bookstore brought them more into the light because of his recent demise. A simple theoretical book for those who wish to know about the existence of life on the planet. More so, it answers questions on why we are here, where did we come from and how we evolved. A debatable concept on the existence of God and the Big Bang theory.

The book relates to some of the good scientific collection of facts about the Ionian Greek groups, a closed group who claimed that everything worked by laws of nature and tried to separate the blind beliefs followed in various religions. Like worshipping of inanimate mountains or substances by ancient men, to finding the real cause for a tsunami or earthquake or solar system or even rains. Scientific evolution claims to be providing more substantial evidence from findings which gradually developed to theories that we proudly believe as scientists.  

Hawking adds his atheist pitch which may or may not be acceptable by many as he purports (as some would understand) that science is the force behind creation. Also, the other interesting facets from the book brings about model-dependent realism (the idea that there is no one version of reality) and about the multiverse concept of reality in which there are many universes. Though the book travels more into quantum physics, Newton’s model that light is a particle in nature, to Einstein’s models that Light has duality and hence it also exists as a waveform. Everything exists in duality and there are theories for everything, and there seems to be a network of theories, which is referred to as the M theory. Each theory within M theory works in a certain range and beyond a certain range when two theories overlap they merge to form a dimension which can describe the framework. Hawking’s cites the concepts of two pebbles striking the water to create overlapping ripples as an example of how different theories came into existence and some may merge to form one or some may not.

A pleasure to read if you always wondered how life came into existence and know a different viewpoint than the religion alone. Questions still tend to be many, like how everything works in the universe in a coordinated manner despite claims of Hawking on individual aspects of Physics and Biology and their convergence to make it sound “No God”. But his views are worth a read, at least to know about some of the greatest minds who contributed to what we are today in science. Most of the true scientists here would appreciate.

A Succinct read and not too much of technical Physics!!