Tags: grand design, leonard mlodinow, stephen hawking, ultimate questions of life, universe creation
For those who have spent the last couple of weeks on a caving holiday or who have been on a visit to the glaciers of Svalbard, the news that Stephen Hawking has published a new book – his first in a decade – may come as a surprise. For the rest of humanity, however, the information will by now seem as stale as a day-old pizza. Certainly, the blizzard of front-page stories that has greeted publication of the first extracts from The Grand Design has been extraordinary and, over the past two weeks, has given the scientist the kind of coverage that modern authors would sell their souls for (though for Tony Blair, this may be too late).
“Hawking: God did not create universe”, the Times announced on its front page, a splash story that was followed up for several days with as much furious religious reaction that the paper’s writers could muster. Other media outlets followed suit – “Bang goes God, says Hawking”, the Star announced – while rabbis, archbishops and religious historians filled letters pages and comment slots with waves of apoplectic outrage.
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God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
