<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/dwight_garner/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Stephen Hawking
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/stephen_w_hawking/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
the most revered scientist since Einstein, is a formidable mathematician
and a formidable salesman. "I want my books sold on airport bookstalls,"
he has impishly declared,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12QUESTIONS.html> and he's
learned how to put them there.
Mr. Hawking's "Brief History of Time," published in 1988, sold some nine
million copies. (A typical science best seller will move a tiny fraction
of that number.) It did so partly by leaning on his preoccupying
personal story. Mr. Hawking's body has been wasted by Lou Gehrig's
disease, <http://www.alsa.org/als/what.cfm> while his mind is utterly
intact, a pinging black box amid the physical wreckage. It was no
accident that Mr. Hawking's wheelchair and elfin face appeared on that
book's cover — a rarity for a book of serious intellect — rather than on
its back flap.
In "A Brief History of Time" Mr. Hawking also dabbled in what the
science writer Timothy Ferris has called "Godmongering." Mr. Hawking, a
longtime professor of mathematics at Cambridge University
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cambridge_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
has hardly displayed a religious bent during his long career. (A memoir
by his former wife
<http://www.amazon.com/Travelling-Infinity-My-Life-Stephen/dp/1846880343>
outed him as an atheist
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/atheism/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.)
But he ended "Brief History" by declaring that the discovery of a
unified theory of physics could help us to "know the mind of God." It
was a line that — cynically, some thought — allowed glints of fuzzy
sunshine to warm the cold blade of his thinking.
Mr. Hawking's new book, "The Grand Design," published on Tuesday, has
already made headlines and been a trending topic on Twitter
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
thanks to a different sort of Godmongering. This time Mr. Hawking has,
we're told, declared God pretty much dead.
His search for an answer to the question "How did the universe begin?"
has led him to suggest that the creation of our universe and others
simply "does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or
god." It's another canny move. Books about the God wars are easier to
argue about than those that parse the finer points of quantum physics.
As I'm typing this, "The Grand Design" is the No. 1 book on Amazon, one
spot above "Freedom," the heavily hyped new Jonathan Franzen
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/jonathan_franzen/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
novel.
The real news about "The Grand Design," however, isn't Mr. Hawking's
supposed jettisoning of God, information that will surprise no one who
has followed his work closely. The real news about "The Grand Design" is
how disappointingly tinny and inelegant it is. The spare and earnest
voice that Mr. Hawking employed with such appeal in "A Brief History of
Time" has been replaced here by one that is alternately condescending,
as if he were Mr. Rogers explaining rain clouds to toddlers, and
impenetrable.
"The Grand Design" is packed with grating yuks. "If you think it is hard
to get humans to follow traffic laws," we read, "imagine convincing an
asteroid to move along an ellipse." (Oh, my.) This is the sort of book
that introduces the legendary physicist Richard Feynman as "a colorful
character who worked at the California Institute of Technology
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/california_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road." Mr. Hawking
has written "The Grand Design" with Leonard Mlodinow, a fellow physicist
who has also worked on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." They're an
awkward pair, part "A Beautiful Mind," part borscht belt. This book is
provocative pop science, an exploration of the latest thinking about the
origins of our universe. But the air inside this literary biosphere is
not especially pleasant to breathe.
At its core "The Grand Design" is an examination of a relatively new
candidate for the "ultimate theory of everything," something called
M-theory, itself an extension of string theory, which tries to reconcile
general relativity and quantum mechanics. "M-theory is not a theory in
the usual sense," the authors write. "It is a whole family of different
theories." According to M-theory, "ours is not the only universe," the
authors say. "Instead M-theory predicts that a great many universes were
created out of nothing." The image that comes to mind here, others have
written about M-theory, is of a God blowing soap bubbles.
But Mr. Hawking and Mr. Mlodinow assert that "their creation does not
require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather,
these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a
prediction of science." Many of these universes would be quite different
from ours, they add, and "quite unsuitable for the existence of any form
of life," or at least any form of life remotely like ours.
M-theory, if it is confirmed, would be "the unifying theory Einstein was
hoping to find," the authors write. But it's a somewhat disappointing
theory, a patchwork quilt rather than a fine, seamless garment.
To approach their thinking about M-theory, Mr. Hawking and Mr. Mlodinow
first stroll leisurely through the history of scientific thinking about
the nature of our universe, from Pythagoras to Descartes, and from
Heisenberg to Feynman. They are often good at working up crisp mental
images. They write about a city in Italy that, a few years ago, barred
pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls. Why? Because it is
cruel, the city council argued, to give the fish "a distorted view of
reality."
We're quite similar to those goldfish, the authors suggest. Our
perceptions are limited and warped by the kind of lenses we see through,
"the interpretive structure of our human brains." Digging deeply into
quantum physics, they argue that our universe "doesn't have just a
single history, but every possible history, each with its own
probability." We create history by observing it; it doesn't create us.
There's plenty in "The Grand Design" that, if you are not a physicist or
a mathematician, will sometimes hurt your head, especially the ideas
about why time as we know it does not exist. As even Feynman once wrote,
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
The arguments in "The Grand Design" — especially those about why God
isn't necessary to imagine the beginning of the universe — put me in
mind of something Mr. Ferris said in his excellent book "The Whole
Shebang" (1997).
"Religious systems are inherently conservative, science inherently
progressive," Mr. Ferris wrote. Religion and science don't have to be
hostile to each other, but we can stop setting them up on blind dates.
"This may be an instance," Mr. Ferris added, "where good walls make good
neighbors."