The New York Times pans Hawking's new book: "tinny and inelegant"

From a NYT's review by Dwight Garner of The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010), by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow:

Mr. Hawking’s new book, “The Grand Design,” published yesterday, has already made headlines and been a trending topic on Twitter, thanks to a different sort of God-mongering. This time Mr. Hawking has, we’re told, declared God pretty much dead.

His search for an answer to the question “How did the universe begin?” has led him to suggest that the creation of our universe and others simply “does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god.” It’s another canny move. Books about the God wars are easier to argue about than those that parse the finer points of quantum physics. As I’m typing this, “The Grand Design” is the No. 1 book on Amazon, one spot above “Freedom,” the heavily hyped new Jonathan Franzen novel.

The real news about “The Grand Design,” however, isn’t Mr. Hawking’s supposed jettisoning of God, information that will surprise no one who has followed his work closely. The real news about “The Grand Design” is how disappointingly tinny and inelegant it is. The spare and earnest voice that Mr. Hawking employed with such appeal in “A Brief History of Time” has been replaced here by one that is alternately condescending, as if he were Mr. Rogers explaining rain clouds to toddlers, and impenetrable.

“The Grand Design” is packed with grating yuks. “If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws,” we read, “imagine convincing an asteroid to move along an ellipse.” (Oh, my.) This is the sort of book that introduces the legendary physicist Richard Feynman as “a colorful character who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road.” Mr. Hawking has written “The Grand Design” with Leonard Mlodinow, a fellow physicist who has also worked on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” They’re an awkward pair, part “A Beautiful Mind,” part Borscht Belt. This book is provocative pop science, an exploration of the latest thinking about the origins of our universe. But the air inside this literary biosphere is not especially pleasant to breathe.

Read the entire review.

Comments

[Fernando Umberto Garcia de Nicaragua, Prefectus Maximus: The Jacksonian Institute]

Hawking has grown increasingly unhinged in recent years. Who can explain it?

[Ron Krumpos]

In "The Grand Design" Stephen Hawking postulates that the M-theory may be the Holy Grail of physics...the Grand Unified Theory which Einstein had tried to formulate and later abandoned. It expands on quantum mechanics and string theories.

In my e-book on comparative mysticism is a quote by Albert Einstein: “…most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and most radiant beauty – which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive form – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all religion.”

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is probably the best known scientific equation. I revised it to help better understand the relationship between divine Essence (Spirit), matter (mass/energy: visible/dark) and consciousness (fx raised to its greatest power). Unlike the speed of light, which is a constant, there are no exact measurements for consciousness. In this hypothetical formula, basic consciousness may be of insects, to the second power of animals and to the third power the rational mind of humans. The fourth power is suprarational consciousness of mystics, when they intuit the divine essence in perceived matter. This was a convenient analogy, but there cannot be a divine formula.

[Howard]

I'm afraid I have to agree with Fernando.

It's a fairly common delusion for a Ph.D. to believe that his thesis is one of the crowning achievements of Western Civilization. (Of course, *mine* really is! :-) ) Hawking takes this a bit far, though; he seems to believe that his thesis, or at least the subject he has concentrated on, actually created the universe.

By the way, Mr. Garner should use Dr. Hawking's correct title.

[Teo Matteo]

OK, i'm going to really catch an appropriate amount of flak for this... but here goes. I think that Hawking's attention is sorta like Vincent Van Gogh. I've always thought that Van Gogh recieved his fame not with his paintings but cuz he cut off his ear in his madness and then did a self portrait of it and then committed suicide which is as dramatic as an artist can get. If one just judged him simply by his painting (especially his portraits of others) he'd be really average. Now, you see where i'm going with Hawking? If he was a perfectly healthy scientist and wrote these things we probably wouldn't be yakking about his metaphysics or the lack thereof...I'm SURE he is very good at science.
OK, let me have it!!!

[M. Love]

Lawrence Krauss (who has an upcoming book titled A Universe From Nothing) supports Hawking in today's WSJ: http://bit.ly/cAvGuh

Truly an eye-opening read. Apparently snowflakes and rainbows are somehow evidence against God, though I regret to point out that the crucial issue of whiskers on kittens remains unaddressed. Also, the fact that the universe may contain zero net energy also buttresses the atheist case. How? Because that's exactly what we'd expect if the universe had arisen from nothing. QED, dulls.

Truly, these are heady and hilarious days to be a Christian. The Lord, in His infinite wisdom, has delivered the goofiest of all conceivable enemies into our hands.

[Sanity Inspector]

"By the way, Mr. Garner should use Dr. Hawking's correct title."

I think that that is a stylistic rule at the Times: everyone is Mr. or Ms.

[Charles]

Even as science claims to one-up religion, Hawking's claim can be reconciled with the Church's teaching. While, of course, Hawking has not observed, does not reason an existence or otherwise acknowledge a Creator, his claim that universes come about somewhat without reason is actually what the Church has taught for millenia. God created everything from nothing, not for any known, observable, easily discernible reason such as to give himself friends, to prove his power or anything to benefit Himself, but for reasons largely left unexplained by both faith and science.