Physicist Sean Carroll, one of the people behind Cosmic Variance here at DISCOVER blogs, tweeted yesterday: "I think Stephen Hawking could say 'ice cream is delicious' and get massive media coverage." He's probably right.
Last month the renowned physicists made the news by warning of the great threat of human extinction over the next couple centuries, but kindly softened the blow by saying that we'll be fine if we can get through our growing pains and get off this planet. Back in April, the wave of attention came from his warning that it might not be such a great idea to attempt to contact aliens, should they be more advanced than us and try to wipe us out.
Now, he's taking on the almighty. Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, co-authored by Leonard Mlodinow, snagged media attention this week because of an excerpt that appeared in the U.K.'s
The Times (which we can't link to, because it's behind an online pay wall).
"Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist," he wrote. "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going." [CNN]
Or, to put it another way, here's a bit from the book's final chapter about the nature of the universe:
"Some would claim the answer to these questions is that there is a God who chose to create the universe that way. 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.
As Carroll video blogged yesterday evening
, these aren't exactly revolutionary statements. For that matter, neither was his note that humans face the risk of extinction by our own hand. These statements ignited a public furor because the man saying them is the world's most identifiable living scientist. To the book itself: Beyond the notes on God, which inspired predictable
from religious authorities, Hawking goes on in the book to outline M-theory
and his ideas about the multiverse. He says it's all in an attempt to figure out "Life, the Universe, and Everything," as Douglas Adams put it
. (We miss you, Doug.)
The conclusions that follow are groundbreaking. Of all the possible universes, some must have laws that allow the appearance of life. The fact that we are here already tells us that we are in that corner of the multiverse. In this way, all origin questions are answered by pointing to the huge number of possible universes and saying that some of them have the properties that allow the existence of life, just by chance. [Washington Post]
The Grand Design comes out on Tuesday, September 7. If you need your fill of offbeat Hawking quotes, though, TIME
and The Guardian
have graciously compiled them for you. Related Content: Cosmic Variance: Stephen Hawking Settles the God Question Once and For All
80beats: Hawking: If Humans Survive a Couple Centuries, We’ll Get Off This Rock
80beats: Stephen Hawking, For One, Does Not Welcome Our New Alien Overlords
DISCOVER: Stephen Hawking Is Making His Comeback
DISCOVER: Inside the World of Stephen Hawking
Image: Bantam
