Monday, April 4, 2011

The Grand Design: A Review

In the spirit of summarizing on books I read (see last blog post), here's my review on Stephen Hawking's 'The Grand Design'.

For the scientist or mathematician in us, this book is a work of art. It reminded me of why I loved these topics back in school. The book tries to answer in a scientific way the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. And no, the answer is not simply 42! Stephen Hawking goes into great detail on the history of man trying to make sense of the Universe around us. From the Mayans to Plato to to scriptures and psalms from the Bible to Newton and Galileo to Einstein and Feynman; Hawking takes us through a remarkable journey of how science evolved and built on these 'shoulders of Giants', each time getting closer and closer to answering that one elusive question.

But what really struck me about this book was that although Hawking makes an attempt to theorize a set of scientific laws that can explain how our Universe operates, these laws end up generating an infinite possible answers for how the Universe works. In other words, the laws cannot explain why any one set of events happen instead of any one of a set of infinite other possibilities. And when the sheer vastness and complexity of the question we are trying to answer dawns upon us in the last few pages, the realization dawns that the Mayans, the Greeks, the Hindus, the Bible and other centuries old scriptures were right all along in believing in a superior being responsible for the workings of our world. Even Einstein in his last few years famously admitted that God does play dice with the world! Maybe that's what Hawkings wanted to tell us all along in his book...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi
while on one hand, Science base itself on facts, there are many things which is beyond the comprehension of science..like love, supernatural, certain feelings, existence of Gods or not. Nevertheless, it is a never ending discussion.

Cheers