Stephen Hawking: “Each of us exists for a very short time, exploring only a tiny part of the universe”

“Each of us exists for a very short time, exploring only a tiny part of the universe.” With that sentence, Stephen Hawking opens one of the most ambitious works of popular science in recent times. The quotation is not merely a flourish. It sets up the question running through “The Grand Design,” the book Hawking wrote with physicist and science communicator Leonard Mlodinow.

The authors set out to address what they describe as the deepest questions about existence, reality and the origin of the universe. How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Did the universe need a Creator? Their starting point is humanity’s curiosity. “Humans are a species marked by curiosity. We ask questions, we seek answers,” they write in the opening pages.

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Each of us exists for a very short time, and in that time explores only a tiny part of the whole universe.

One of the book’s most provocative claims appears almost immediately: “Philosophy is dead.” Hawking and Mlodinow argue that philosophy failed to keep pace with modern scientific developments, particularly in physics. Scientists, they say, now carry “the torch of discovery” in the search for knowledge.

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Humans are a species marked by curiosity. We ask questions, we seek answers.

The book describes a view of the universe that differs sharply from the traditional picture and even from ideas held only one or two decades earlier. Hawking and Mlodinow trace that shift through the history of physics. Until the 1920s, classical thinking assumed that objects followed clearly defined paths and had precise positions at every moment. That framework could not explain what scientists observed at atomic and subatomic scales, making quantum physics necessary.

To explain quantum theories, the authors turn to Richard Feynman, whom they describe as “quite a character,” a physicist who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played bongos in a roadside nightclub. In Feynman’s formulation, a system has not one history but every possible history.

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Philosophy is dead.

The book’s boldest idea is M-theory, presented as the only known candidate for a “theory of everything.” Rather than a single theory in the usual sense, it is a family of theories, each applying to a particular range of physical situations. The authors compare it with a world map: just as no flat map can accurately represent the entire surface of Earth, no single theory can describe every possible physical observation. The supplied article ends while introducing the theory’s predictions.

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the torch of discovery