What Hath Hawking Wrought?

By Edward Cornish

Scientists show how gravitational forces might create universes spontaneously, with no divine intervention required.

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Bantam Books. 2010. 119 pages. Color illustrations, including original art by Peter Bollinger. $28.

In their ambitious new book, The Grand Design, mathematician Stephen Hawking and his collaborator, physicist Leonard Mlodinow of Caltech, offer scientific explanations for many of the mysteries of the universe.

Why do we exist?

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why do we live under this particular set of natural laws and not some other?

Philosophers have long struggled with such questions and typically ended by invoking God. But Hawking and Mlodinow insist on a strictly scientific view, commenting, “It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. In this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that entity is called God. This is known as the first-cause argument for the existence of God. We claim, however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings.”

To warm up for Hawking’s expansive thinking, we might begin with his assertion that our universe is merely one of a set or assemblage of universes, which he calls the Multiverse, or M-Theory.

“Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws,” Hawking and Mlodinow assert. “The Multiverse Theory is the only theory that has all the properties we think the final theory ought to have.”

According to the authors, a whole universe can be created out of nothing because gravity shapes space and time.

“Gravity allows space-time to be locally stable but globally unstable,” they write. “On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, a universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God….”

Hawking and Mlodinow write in a friendly, engaging style, but the average reader may still struggle with their mind-blowing ideas. Never mind: It’s worth making the effort. Most of us don’t stretch our minds nearly enough.

Readers will certainly expand their thinking by reading The Grand Design, but they may have difficulty finding immediate practical use for it. But let us be patient: Practical uses may well come in the future. In science, theory tends to precede practical applications. Benjamin Franklin’s theorizing about electricity (along with his experiments) led eventually to the huge electric-power industry that we know today. So sometime in the future, Hawking’s ideas may well reshape the world economy and other aspects of our world that we have yet to imagine.

About the Reviewer

Edward Cornish is the founding editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and founder of the World Future Society.