A Book A Week - Week 15: The Grand Design

This week's book:
    The Grand Design   by  Stephen Hawking

Grade:    A  if you're into science books
              C   if you're like most Americans

Stephen Hawking is getting old.  He's in his 70's now, and had to retire as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (Unversity rules, evidently, not his choice).  He's written several books, and this is, perhaps, his last one, as his condition deteriorates and he gets closer to the time when even those without ALS see the finish line coming up fast.  But as his possible last book, The Grand Design is his best.  And his most controversial.

Here's the spoiler:  in this book Hawking lays out the reason why he thinks there is no God.

I think he saved this one for last because this book is a distillation of his work to date, his understanding of the entirety of physics, not only the icing on the cake but the cake itself, and the table the cake rests on, and the building, and the planet, and the solar system... you get the idea.

I loved this book.  I did not agree with some of it - Hawking like most physicists is entirely too accepting of the concept of the wave-particle duality - but there's nothing I love more than a well-reasoned argument, and this book is certainly that.  He starts out with mythology and moves through Greek science to Renaissance rediscovery and the creation of modern scientific method through Newton and Einstein to present day theories.  His stated aim at the beginning of the book is to answer three specific questions:
   Why is there something rather than nothing?
   Why do we exist?
   Why this particular set of laws and not some other?

Does the author answer these questions?
   Well... that depends.  If you're a fundamentalist of any sort, Christian, Muslim, or whatever other religion allows fundamentalism, then, no, he does not answer those questions.  Matter of fact, everything he has to say would make you want to scream and run from the room.  But then, if you're a true fundamentalist you wouldn't be asking those questions or talking to Professor Hawking in the first place.
   If you're a reasonably smart person and not personally invested in superstition and intolerance disguised as religion, then it certainly does seem as if he answers those questions.  He advocates the strong anthropic principle, or at least ends up there after presenting his arguments.  Essentially, the answer to those three questions is:  we exist in a universe rather than there being a void (Q1 and Q2) because the universe is specifically tailored to produce beings who could ask those questions in the first place (Q3).  
    Hawking reasons his way around to it very elegantly, but he still concludes with what is, at its base, a tautology.  There's more to it, of course, and the author presents his case in an entire book while I've summarized in a sentence.  You'll get more out of it when you read the book.

If you like science books I would definitely recommend The Grand Design.  It's not too long, but it is very well-written.  The crowning achievement of an impossible career.
  If you don't like science books give it a pass.  Seriously.  It's written plainly as possible but if you don't like this sort of thing, this book is definitely not going to change your mind. 

Next week:
   The Interestings   by  Meg Wolitzer
   This is absolutely not a book I would ever choose if I were not reading a Book A Week.  Let's see how much my horizons are expanded.