The Grand Design

The Grand Design Review

The Grand Design, co-written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, represents a more explicitly philosophical turn than A Brief History of Time, opening with the claim that philosophy is dead and proceeding to answer three of the biggest questions in science and metaphysics: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do the laws of physics have the form they do? And is the fine-tuning of physical constants evidence for a designer?

Hawking and Mlodinow’s answer centres on M-theory — the theoretical framework that attempts to unify the various versions of string theory — and on the concept of model-dependent realism. They argue that the universe did not require a creator because the laws of physics themselves, combined with the quantum mechanical notion that the universe can spontaneously emerge from nothing, account for its existence. The multiverse predicted by M-theory means that a universe with our specific constants is inevitable — there are enough universes that all possible configurations exist, and we simply find ourselves in one compatible with life.

The book generated controversy both among physicists, who argue about M-theory’s scientific status (it makes no currently testable predictions), and among philosophers, who objected to the dismissal of their discipline. The controversy is part of the book’s interest: it is not a gentle introduction but a provocative argument from one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated scientists, making strong claims about questions that remain genuinely unresolved. As a companion to A Brief History of Time, it shows how much cosmological thinking had developed in the two decades between them and how much remains open.