Stephen Hawking is one of the world's most brilliant and acclaimed scientists. I loved his previous book "A Brief History of Time" in which he talked about black holes, inflation, quantum mechanics and general relativity. He was on much firmer ground there, discussing concrete things which could more or less be experimentally investigated and verified.

But in this book he mainly deals with fanciful speculation about the much-exalted 'theory of everything'. In Hawking and Mlodinow's opinion, the best candidate for this theory is 'M-theory', an extension of string theory which promises to unify all the forces and explain 'everything'. But this is far from being a convincing argument. Firstly, there have been many recent critiques of string theory (for instance in the books known Nobel prize winning particle physicist Martin Veltman has been especially critical of such attempts at constructing 'grand unified theories'. As he said in his Nobel Prize interview, there is no good scientific reason (except expectations of beauty and elegance which are not good metrics in themselves for judging scientific theories) why there should in fact be a unified theory. This is more of a fond expectation based on the history of physics than a reasonable hypothesis backed up theory. But even someone with a rudimentary understanding of the scientific method can see the problem with complex theories that are very difficult, if not impossible, to test and which are based mainly on mathematical elegance rather than concrete connections to reality. Unfortunately I thought that Hawking and Mlodinow buy too easily into such speculations. The ideas are fascinating by themselves, no doubt, but they don't belong to the domain of what eighteenth and nineteenth century pioneers of science would have called sound science. One expected a much more critical approach from a mind as accomplished as Hawking's.

The media hype is just that--hype. The Grand Design is a very disappointing performance theory can prove the universe spontaneously erupted from nothing and if proved "will be a model of the universe that creates itself." If the critics of "psi" accept these authors' example of argument I will lose faith in the critics' objectivity when it comes to their evaluation of theories on paranormal phenomenon.

There is little that is new here. Proposing M-Theory as the basis for describing the origin of the universe is certainly not a new idea. Arguing for M-Theory describing a universe's spontaneous generation from nothing is a new proposal in the world of cosmology--but not for the realm of non-Greek based philosophy. Thousands of years ago the Taoist described the universe as self generated from nothing. It's nice to see cosmology is catching up to thousands-of-years-old philosophy, contrary to the authors' opposing assertion in their opening remarks.

I will grant the book will stir thought and argument, which may be the authors' primary goal, since after 30 years of effort string theory /M-theory is wallowing in a quagmire due to its failure to simplify into the grand design. The authors' assert that the disjointed complexity of the M-theory is as good as it gets,just compromise and don't waste any more time on trying to make it better--it is already The Grand Design. Hmmmmm, what was the basis of that argument again?

I hope the authors will take on the rigor of producing a mathematical model, derived from current work that has some validation from Cosmic Ray Background measurements to demonstrate their conclusions. That will at least, allow others to check their work and bring authenticity to the proposal. Maybe they've done that work and neglected to mention it--one can only hope?

I for one, as a professional physicist and engineer, am not convinced by their arguments and do not see that they answered the three philosophical questions proposed in the first chapter. By the end of reading the second chapter I added a fourth question...should cosmologist attempt to become philosophers?

Welcoming your responses,
Bob Lindberg

  While there is beginning to be a build up of negative reviews for this book, I want to preface my review by saying that Dr. Hawking is still one of the top players in his field and that his views hold considerable weight given his track record. That being said, I found this book to mirror what most of the reviews have already noted. Nothing new is presented here that wasn't already said in Hawking's earlier book A Brief History of Time. Hawking begins the book by saying that philosophy is dead and that scientists must answer the tough questions about life....then launches into philosophy for a good part of the book. While Hawking has done much work with quantum mechanics, there are reasons to be skeptical of his conclusions given what other prominent people in his field have to say and the current state of knowns and unknowns about quantum mechanics. The best I can say is that the book is interesting at times but highly speculative and the conclusions drawn are questionable. I would suggest reading Roger Penrose's review of the book to get an idea of what his colleagues (Penrose is certainly of the same stature as Hawking, just not as much of a name outside of the scientific field) had to say. Hawking so far as I know, has not really responded to some of the challenges from those within his community.

Conclusion: Don't buy the book unless you're a really big Hawking fan or are doing research on the subject and want Hawking's thoughts on quantum mechanics and scientific determinism. The book is rather short and can be read in just a few days. Perhaps there was a letdown because people expected more from a Stephen Hawking book ( I may be guilty of this )but it feels like Hawking is going over familiar territory and did not do enough to substantiate his position on the subject. Regardless of your feelings about Hawking's atheistic conclusions I would say that theists, agnostics, and atheists alike will not find the challenging, cutting edge book that many had hope for or expected.