[MD] The Grand Design

[118]

Hey John,

Looks like the answer is not 42.  This coming from the Grand Wizard himself,
see below.  Sorry to burst your bubble.

Mark



Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Stephen Hawking on The Grand Design

How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? Over twenty
years ago I wrote *A Brief History of Time*, to try to explain where the
universe came from, and where it is going. But that book left some important
questions unanswered. Why is there a universe--why is there something rather
than nothing? Why do we exist? Why are the laws of nature what they are? Did
the universe need a designer and creator?

It was Einstein’s dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a
single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein’s
day hadn’t made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for
that to be a realistic goal. And by the time I had begun writing *A Brief
History of Time*, there were still several key advances that had not yet
been made that would prevent us from fulfilling Einstein’s dream. But in
recent years the development of M-theory, the top-down approach to
cosmology, and new observations such as those made by satellites like NASA’s
COBE and WMAP, have brought us closer than ever to that single theory, and
to being able to answer those deepest of questions. And so Leonard Mlodinow
and I set out to write a sequel to *A Brief History of Time* to attempt to
answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The
result is *The Grand Design*, the product of our four-year effort.

In *The Grand Design* we explain why, according to quantum theory, the
cosmos does not have just a single existence, or history, but rather that
every possible history of the universe exists simultaneously. We question
the conventional concept of reality, posing instead a "model-dependent"
theory of reality. We discuss how the laws of our particular universe are
extraordinarily finely tuned so as to allow for our existence, and show why
quantum theory predicts the multiverse--the idea that ours is just one of
many universes that appeared spontaneously out of nothing, each with
different laws of nature. And we assess M-Theory, an explanation of the laws
governing the multiverse, and the *only* viable candidate for a complete
"theory of everything." As we promise in our opening chapter, unlike the
answer to the Ultimate Question of Life given in the *Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy*, the answer we provide in *The Grand Design* is not, simply,
"42."