Book review: The Grand Design

Published on Tuesday 21 September 2010 16:11

THE GRAND DESIGN Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow Bantam Press, £18.99

STEPHEN Hawking, the most revered scientist since Einstein, is a formidable mathematician and a formidable salesman.

"I want my books sold on airport bookstalls," he has declared, and he's learned how to put them there.

In A Brief History Of Time Hawking dabbled in what the science writer Timothy Ferris has called "Godmongering." Hawking has hardly displayed a religious bent during his long career. 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. Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, has already been a trending topic on Twitter, thanks to a different sort of Godmongering. This time Hawking has, we're told, declared God pretty much dead.

The real news about The Grand Design, however, isn't Hawking's supposed jettisoning of God. It is how disappointingly tinny and inelegant it is. The spare and earnest voice Hawking employed with such appeal in his bestseller has been replaced by one that is alternately condescending and impenetrable.

The Grand Design is packed with grating banalities. "If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws," we read, "imagine convincing an asteroid to move along an ellipse." This is the sort of book that introduces the legendary physicist Richard Feynman as "a colourful character who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road." Hawking has written this work with Leonard Mlodinow, a fellow physicist who has also worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation. 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 this 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. According to M-theory, "ours is not the only universe," the authors say.

M-theory, if it is confirmed, would be "the unifying theory Einstein was hoping to find," they write. But it's a somewhat disappointing theory, a patchwork quilt rather than a fine, seamless garment.

Hawking and 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."

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on September 25, 2010