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A review by rebeccacider
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow
4.0
I learned a lot of interesting things in this book and appreciated the book's inquiry into profound cosmological questions, but hats off to any non-specialist who understands the last three pages (you know, the one where the authors sum up the answer to life, the universe, and everything in an oddly cursory fashion).
In general I prefer my popular nonfiction to give me a snapshot of the state of an academic discipline rather than promoting specific theories, but physicists, what can you do.
I also thought Hawking and Mlodinow could have done a better job steering readers away from Wrong Ideas and general confusion that could arise from multiverse theory (like, do all those histories of a photon EXIST in the same way that multiple universes are proposed to exist? If observing the photon selects its history, what about humans observing the universe? I don't know whether these are sensible questions to ask but I'm sure I'm not the only reader who wondered about them.)
In general I prefer my popular nonfiction to give me a snapshot of the state of an academic discipline rather than promoting specific theories, but physicists, what can you do.
I also thought Hawking and Mlodinow could have done a better job steering readers away from Wrong Ideas and general confusion that could arise from multiverse theory (like, do all those histories of a photon EXIST in the same way that multiple universes are proposed to exist? If observing the photon selects its history, what about humans observing the universe? I don't know whether these are sensible questions to ask but I'm sure I'm not the only reader who wondered about them.)