By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Bantam Books
ISBN : 978-0-553-80537-6
If you have read and liked “A Short History of Time” from Hawking, you will love his new book, “The Grand Design”, co-written with California Institute of Technology physicist Mlodinow.
Few scientists combine the ability to come up with totally new ideas of how the Universe works, get proven right in their lifetime AND being able to write about those ideas in a way that is enlightening, enjoyable and accessible to a huge worldwide audience. Stephen Hawking is a master at doing both.
Reading “The Grand Design” might make you feel awfully small and the comparison to a gold fish gazing out from its glass bowl may even strike you as a but too humbling… but what the heck, once you realize that you actually understand what parallel dimensions and realities mean and how those may be governed by predictable laws of physics, you will forgive the comparison to a goldfish. You will accept that we are probably just that and we better accept it.
True to form, the authors do discuss the nature and relevance of time and lead you gently to that higher plane of thought where you start to believe that time did in fact have a beginning.
You may not think that reading about cosmology would make you miss your favorite show on TV but start reading this book and you may very well forget for a time that you actually had a favorite show…
Highly recommended.