Book explains creation of universe minus God

Why stop with just arguing about God?

Describing the creator as "not necessary" in his
latest book is just another day at the office for that
whimsical scamp Stephen Hawking, better known as
"one of the foremost theoretical physicists of this
century" in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of
Scientists.
In his latest book, , out Sept. 7, Hawking and his
co-author, Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow,
also lay down their views on intelligent design
(bad), string theory (good) and philosophy ("dead").

"We're not saying there is no God, we're saying there
is no need for God to explain the universe," says
Mlodinow. "The views in the book are scientific
ones."

The scientific views in the book are the ones
Hawking developed after he wrote 2005's , with
Mlodinow. That book updated (and condensed)
Hawking's Brief History of Time, the 1988 best-
selling tome that made him a household name,
laying out how modern "standard model" physics
explained how stars and galaxies grew from the
early moments of the universe.

Hawking, now 68 and confined to a wheelchair
because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou
Gehrig's disease), also discussed his own work
showing how black holes may emit radiation over
time.

That's all. The Grand Design instead hunts bigger
game.

"The book was really written to address two
questions. Where did the universe come from and
why are the laws of the universe so finely tuned to
allow our existence," Mlodinow says.

Chiefly, Hawking says in the new book that
is criticizing his own approach in his 1988 book)
with "the usual assumption in cosmology that the
universe has a single definite history," which he
calls a "bottom-up" approach. "Instead, one should
trace the histories from the top down, backward
from the present time," he writes.

How do we do that? In the last few decades,
physicists have seen the 13.7 billion-year-old
signature of the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave
Background Radiation, filling space. And they have
grappled with a unifying theory explaining both
gravity and nuclear forces (now unreconciled by
standard theories), often called superstring theory
or " M-theory," that suggests the universe has many
"hidden" dimensions besides the familar up-down,
sideways and back-and-forth ones that most of us
experience while sober. Both of these advances,
Hawking suggests, point to a surprising
understanding of our origins.

Taking M-theory's hidden dimensions seriously and
tracing the history of our universe backwards in
time ("top-down") points to our universe being just
one of gazillions of universes spawned at the time
of the Big Bang, Hawking writes. Some of those
universes would have completely different physical
laws. "In some universes electrons have the weight
of golf balls and the force of gravity is stronger than
that of magnetism. In ours the standard model, with
all its parameters (rules), applies."

So there's nothing special about our universe that
needs explaining for why gravity or electromagnetic
forces have their particular strength, values which
allowed life to evolve on our planet. We got the one
we got.

Also in this view, the universe blasted itself into
existence spontaneously, following M-theory's rules
to create physical laws that we call gravity,
magnetism and so on, purely by chance. "He's
pointing to a crucial and fascinating feature of
Einstein's general relativity (law of gravity):
universes are free!" says Caltech physicist Sean
Carroll in an e-mail. He's the author of From Eternity
to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.
"It costs precisely zero energy (and zero anything
else) to make an entire universe. From that
perspective, perhaps it's not surprising that the
universe did come into existence."

The pronouncements about God also aren't all that
surprising coming from Hawking, says science
journalism professor Declan Fahy of American
cosmologists have made a mistake (and implicitly heUniversity in Washington D.C., who has written
about the history of the celebrity scientist. "A Brief
History of Time has a catchphrase about physicists
'knowing the mind of God'," Fahy says.

"Some people criticize this as using God as a
marketing technique. There is some validity to that
view, but also some unfairness," Fahy adds. "I think
what has really captured the public mind about
Hawking is the image of this great scientist
overcoming real physical challenges to do his
work."

"I just hope a reader comes away from the book
thinking 'Wow, the universe is really a cool place',"
says Mlodinow, a well-regarded science writer who
also wrote episodes of . "I hope people really can
feel some of the awe in the beauty of nature that
scientists feel, and understand where they come
from."