Commentary on ' The grand design' , by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinov

In the beginning when there was near nothing ( Though, gravity was always to be there, says the book), say of the size of an atom, genereal theory of relativity would not be valid ( and the expansion of the space must have happened at infinite times the speed of light) and only the quantum mechanics would apply. Therefore, ( since none of us were there to observe ) the quantum particles must have chosen every possible trajectory. Now since according to M theory, there are 11 ( 10 dimensions and time) dimensions including the time ( even though you and I can experience only four because others are too small for us to see in our universe), there must be billions of other worlds like us and trillions who would not be like us because the dimensions they may exist will be a different set of three ( because more than 3 dimension worlds are not stable) than ours.

Obviously those worlds would have a different set of laws etc than ours.

The book then goes to a great length highlighting the miraculous nature of the planet that we inhabit. To quote some:

"The many improbable occurrences that conspired to enable our existence... if...."

".......Our solar system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life but also the characteristics of our entire universe, and that is much more difficult to explain."

".......At the time no one knew enough nuclear physics to understand the magnitude of the Serendipity that resulted in these exact physical laws."

The key word used many times to justify the things why they are the way they are is serendipity.

The universe seemingly can be born out of nothing..if there was to be gravity before the universe, according to the book.

However to have a gravity you need the matter and energy which requires the universe and that would put us back to where we began.


There is that usual dogma attached as to every subject that looks at the world only from its own point of view. Like to a musician the creation is just a rhythm, to chemistry is all about chemical reactions and periodic table, to engineers everything is engineering and to mathematician everything mathematics. ..poor us!

Philosophy is a subject which ought to join the fragments and try and project a plausible reality. However the book begins by saying that philosophy is dead and I agree entirely that the way we knew philosophy, indeed is dead but ..but...is supposedly being taken over by physics.....!

Science needs to be objective or else it's not science and if it engages to dabble in what essentially is unknowable with its faculties, it begins to sound very amateurish.

The book confronts the Bible, esp,, the Genesis, but maintains an ominous silence on the Upnishads. It is my belief that the interpretation and the very definition of God should be finalized first, before trying to make a comment on it, using the typical reductionist approach.

When it is well known and accepted by prominent physicists around the world that upnishad's understanding of creation and the creator is far more sophisticated, subtle and holistic, the very omission suggests that to the esteemed authors the definition of 'Brahman' seemed too inconvenient while discussing the truth of creation.

Here I quote, Ulrich Mohrof, a Quantum physicist and spiritualist:


"Remember the ancient conundrum about the divisibility of matter? If the synchronic multiplicity of the world rested on surfaces that carve up things much as cookie cutters carve up rolled-out pastry, then things ought to be divisible ad infinitum. If on the other hand we want to understand matter in the manner which has been paradigmatic for some 25 centuries — i.e., in terms of the composition and interaction of parts — then there have to be ultimate, not further divisible parts. But why then are these parts not further divisible? Thanks to QM, we know now why the modern “atoms” — quarks and leptons — are not further divisible. The reason they are not further divisible is that they are formless. The shapes of things resolve themselves into sets of fuzzy relative positions (or spatial relations) between formless objects.
If now you recall that ultimately there is only one “thing,” and that this is or consti-tutes everything, you will conclude that the shapes of things resolve themselves into MOHRHOFF: SPIRITUAL PHYSICS 65
the self-relations of a single formless “something.” Taking our cue from the Upanishads, we might as well call it Brahman. Brahman is said
• to be without form,
• to constitute all things,
• to contain all things,
• to originate all things.
 
Here is a nutshell account, based on QM, of how formless Brahman originates and comes to contain and constitute all things: Brahman enters into spatial relations with itself. As a result,
• there are things that have shapes (sets of spatial relations),
• there is space — Brahman as the one place that contains them all,
• there is matter — Brahman as the apparent multitude of relata (“apparent” because the relations are self-relations) and as the one thing that constitutes them all.
 
Can you think of a more concise creation story or a more economical way to manifest a world?"

Unqote.

'The grand design', the book, may be considered as a nice introduction in physics to a lay man and may certainly prove to be a money spinner that may have been an important motivation for the authors and the publishers, it does little to unravel anything fundamentally new.

My friend ( if I may call him, since he is my FB friend and also has seen and commented on Banaras movie), Urich Mohrof's short extract, quoted earlier, from his paper 'spiritual physics', speaks all that can be spoken of creation and the creator, in nutshell.

To me this is the truth, because it is simple.