God did not create the universe,the man who is arguably Britain's most famous living scientist says in a forthcoming book. In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity....
...The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have been created out of chaos. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
In the forthcoming book, published on 9 September, Hawking says that M-theory, a form of string theory, will achieve this goal: "M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find," he theorises. "The fact that we human beings – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature – have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph." Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have arisen from chaos was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.....
This has upset some people. The reality is rather different to what the many critics might claim (notably without the benefit of actually reading the book and trying to understand it's arguments). I've got a copy of Victor Stenger's Quantum Gods, and in it he talks about why we should expect something from nothing. In nature, without an external energy source systems of higher symmetry tend to spontaneously (that is without cause!) to make phase transitions to a state of lower symmetry and as the physicist Frank Wilczek noted in 1980, since nothing is more symmetric than nothing, you would expect nothing to be unstable. In the Hartle-Hawking scenario, the Universe is produced by the quantum tunnelling of a prior Universe through chaos (nothingness), the Vilenkin scenario is similar but no prior Universe exists. Either way, the means are entirely natural. The laws of physics are successful in describing what we observe and are invariable with no special requirement for anything else to be inserted in there. Might be getting ahead of myself here though, I'll have to grab a copy of the book and find out for myself what the authors have to say on that.
In the LA times book review it says that the book sets out to answer three questions - 1) What is the nature of those laws? 2) Are there exceptions to the laws (for example, miracles)? 3) Is there only one set of possible laws?
