The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, Bantam Books, New York, 2010. $28.00 (208 pp.). ISBN 978-0-553-80537-6
Philosophy is dead and unable to answer the deepest questions, such as the question of creation, but M-theory may hold the key. Such provocative statements, lightened by wonderful images from ancient Greece to the multiverse, make up The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, a handsome book about current ideas in cosmology and particle physics and about the search for a unified theory of everything.
Hawking and Mlodinow’s entertaining prose covers creation myths from different cultures and a brief history of scientific thought traced from the Greeks to Isaac Newton. Those early so-called natural philosophers allowed for exceptions to the laws of nature as a way for scientific thought to coexist with their religious beliefs. Credit goes to Pierre Simon Laplace for...