There are only a couple of positives that I can think to say about this book. Firstly, Hawking has some Feynman-like qualities in being able to lucidly express important ideas in physics such as time dilation in special relativity and the double slit experiment. Secondly, model-based realism has a ring of truth about it, although why it is called realism is never fully explained. I did not find this book particularly easy to read, probably because I did not believe from the outset that I was going to be enlightened about our origins.

1) "Philosophy is dead". Scientists should be especially circumspect when trying to extrapolate their ideas into the humanities. Contemporary readers are still able to detect an elusive thread of truth running through all great philosophical works, and that, like the great works of art, they certainly have not been superseded by developments in science. Scientists meddling in the humanities often give the impression of never having studied the subjects they are criticising and tend to make 'straw man' arguments. The question 'why are we here?' is supposedly solved by science, but is of much more profound significance than Hawking credits. We feel our lives to have value as well as function and our desire throughout history to find life meaningful cannot be dismissed as lacking any significance. 'Is there a creator?' I have no particular axe to grind in favour of religion, but Hawking hypocritically rehashes ancient philosophical arguments for the non-existence of God, such as "who created God?". Moreover, religions cannot be treated simply as ontologies devoid of all the mythical elements that have inspired some of the greatest products of art and civilisation. Indeed, Weber tells us that science itself was given impetus by Protestantism.

2) Anthropic arguments. Personally, I don't see their significance. It is only strange that the universe has these particular values for the universal constants or that the Earth's orbit has this narrow range of orbital parameters leading to the evolution of humanity if you have some reference point outside the universe to assess it from. We are doing science from the perspective of the human race as we are here and now, so of course the universe appears to us to be evolved to suit us, otherwise we would not be here to do the science.

3) M Theory. I am not sufficiently qualified to give an opinion on this, but one thing it seems possible to say is that 'multiverse' theories are unique in science not only for never having been tested but also for being impossible to test. A far-fetched theory for why the dinosaurs died out at least has the possibility of being tested against palaeontological evidence. Any notions we entertain to make the concept of causality apply beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause. I agree with Pliny (ancient wisdom that Hawking dismisses) who states the impossibility of measuring the universe or understanding how it arose. To me, 'universe' by definition means everything that exists, so how can there be any reference point outside it from which to measure it? Cosmological physics turns out paradoxes by the dozen. If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? What caused the big bang? If we need mathematics to explain this, what makes us so sure we can rely on mathematics? And what about reasoning itself? What is truth? Oh darn it - another philosophical question!

Prismatic wrote:

Andlan wrote: Cosmological physics turns out paradoxes by the dozen. If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? What caused the big bang?

Intuition is developed out of everyday events and that makes it hard to imagine an expanding universe that is simply expanding in the sense of all its constituents getting farther apart without at the same time imagining surrounding space into which it expands. However any surrounding space would be part of the universe. The answer to your question is that it is not expanding into anything. It's just expanding. Similarly with the question what caused the big bang. There does not have to be a cause at all, it is just the condition of a singularity at the beginning of time.

Thanks Prismatic. It strikes me that cosmology gets into trouble when it treats the universe as a 'thing' that can be encompassed by our thought i.e. metaphysics. I have no objection to the big bang as singularity, because this is epistemology and stays rooted in our mathematical conceptions. Similarly, nobody can deny Hubble's discovery that most of the galaxies are moving away from us; but only an object can 'expand' and this linguistic slight of hand tends to go unnoticed. Once we start to think of a balloon we get into trouble because a balloon consists of a membrane, for which there is no cosmological equivalent. Similarly, the big bang and multiverses should be seen for what they are - creation myths originating from a deep-seated desire amongst positivist physicists such as Hawking to have a 'theory of everything', in which they can substitute physics for metaphysics, and hence remove the observer(us) from the picture.