To whom it may concern.
My son in law happens to be a promising brain who does research work at Imperial College in London. But may be he is not so smart after all. First he married a little pest who happens to be my cherished daughter, and second he grossly overestimated the old fool I am. As a Christmas present he offered me Stephen Hawkings' latest book "The Grand Design".
Because I am an old fool I was stupid enough to face the challenge of reading " The Grand Design". Even though I have some notions about quantic physics, I humbly admit I was not able to understand much about the Model-dependent-theory, the multiverse, the top-down theory and the sort of stuff that makes my son in law vibrate. There are not many like him, they are about eighty in the whole world, who are able to communicate on that sort of thing.
And yet even though I am an old fool I feel enthusiastic about this book. To put it simple I did not understand the words but I liked the music of this book. The music of the stars of ancient religion.
That 's the core of it : it 's all about religion. But in this book the word religion is taboo, like the word God. A scientist wouldn't like to look like a poet if he used the taboo word. And yet André Breton would appreciate the surrealistic stuff you can read in this book. Let me quote page 227 and you will understand what I mean :
" Because there is a law like gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing.... spontaneous creation is the reason why 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"
Comment There is indeed no need to invoke God but why is there such a law that creates a universe out of nothing ? And what is the Grand Design for ?
I like the music of the book because it is the music of angels chanting God's glory in the multiverse. This is my religious bias, it is an a priori, just as the book concludes on an atheistic a priori. Religion and science are rooted in a priori.
But since neither religion nor science can bring any certainty you cannot escape Pascal's bet to account for the Grand Design. As for me I bet on God and on a rational religion. I will tell you more about it in the next post (ref 07).