[MD] The Grand Design

[John Carl]

Bless you Mark.  At last an intelligent and cohesive response to my
questions and challenges.

And so apropos, so perfect.

Now having something to chew over, I will get back to you upon proper
digestion.

Thank you very much,

John




On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 11:16 PM, 118 <ununoctiums at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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."
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