The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking

• All Critics: 28
• Positive: 8
• Negative: 20

• The Washington Post | 5 Sep 2010

  It gets into the deepest questions of modern cosmology without a single equation. The reader will be able to get through it without bogging down in a lot of technical detail and will, I hope, have his or her appetite whetted for books with a deeper technical content.

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• The Wall Street Journal | 24 Sep 2010

  It is unfortunate that Messrs. Hawking and Mlodinow choose to open their book by picking a pointless disciplinary fight...Our best hope for constructing sensible answers lies with scientists and philosophers working together, not scoring points off one another.

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• The Daily Beast | 10 Sep 2010

  This isn’t your typical popular science book...The book’s conclusions are so sweeping and address such fundamental questions of existence that it often borders on philosophy.

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• The Guardian | 11 Sep 2010

  It is all entertaining stuff, skilfully assembled and described in a fairly droll manner...The book is also commendably brief and by and large illuminating about the complexities of modern cosmology.

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• Los Angeles Times | 5 Sep 2010

  This succinct, easily digested book could perhaps do with fewer dry, academic groaners, but Hawking and Mlodinow pack in a wealth of ideas and leave us with a clearer understanding of modern physics in all its invigorating complexity.

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• The New York Times | 7 Sep 2010

  The real news about “The Grand Design” is how disappointingly tinny and inelegant it is. The spare and earnest voice that Mr. Hawking employed...has been replaced here by one that is alternately condescending, as if he were Mr. Rogers explaining rain clouds to toddlers, and impenetrable.

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• Apologetics 315 | 4 Dec 2010

  As for Hawking and Mlodinow, they are confident that the complete theory of the universe “will be a model of the universe that creates itself.” For the rest of us, nothing still comes from nothing, and universes still don’t create themselves.

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• The Economist | 9 Sep 2010

  The authors may be in this enviable state of enlightenment, but most readers will not have a clue what they are on about....This is physics by sound-bite.

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• Common Sense Atheism | 27 Oct 2010

  Instead, Hawking’s book is another enjoyable romp through modern physics, and one to be read as some people’s interpretation of very fuzzy and inadequate data, rather than as “a brilliant physicist with an answer.”... If you expect the book to make the argument it was advertised as making, you will be disappointed.

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• The Telegraph | 20 Sep 2010

  The Grand Design is a speculative book about an exceedingly arcane area of theoretical physics. Even if M-theory is the best candidate for a Theory of Everything, it will not...result in anything more than a collection of unproved and unprovable hypotheses.

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• The Galilean | 11 Sep 2010

  But now, for me, the drum roll and flourish of trumpets is gone, replaced by the sour blat of horns. Unless I have missed a step in Hawking’s reasoning, it certainly does not seem as if he has answered the question “Why M Theory,” or the bigger question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

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• Rhapsody in Books | 25 Oct 2010

  This book is written for a broad audience, including those who are mathematically illiterate... I recommend it highly for the scientifically and philosophically curious.

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• And Now For Something Completely Different | 14 Sep 2011

  The Grand Design (co-written by Leonard Mlodinow) is quite a beautiful book with color artwork and photography. Far from being some dry, technical tome stretching for a thousand pages, the book is a quick moving refresher on the drive to unify the various theories of physics (gravity, electromagnetic, etc.) into one Grand Unified Theory.

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• The Space Review | 18 Oct 2010

  This high-level discussion will leave people who want to dig deeper into some of the book’s topics—such as why rolling up those additional dimensions in different ways results in different laws of physics—wanting, though.

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• New Scientist | 2 Sep 2010

  Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking famously declared that a "theory of everything" was on the horizon... Hawking has given up. But it is not his fault, he says: there may not be a final theory to discover after all. No matter; he can explain the riddles of existence without it.

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• The Guardian | 17 Sep 2010

  So we are left with a...cosmology book which is of course slightly more up to date than a dozen other, equally readable cosmology books that have appeared in the past decade, all of which confess increasing uncertainty about the things that happened or might have happened in the first trillionth of a second of creation...

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• Culture Mob | 8 Sep 2010

  While such Einsteinean hubris is hardly surprising from Hawking, a man firmly entrenched in the camp of scientific theory and renowned for his work on black holes, his explanation behind such conjecture leaves much to be desired.

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• God: New evidence

  As Hawking and Mlodinow say that no-one knows what the M stands for, I suggest that - at least in ‘The Grand Design’ - it stands for ‘Mystification.’... the art of appearing to say something profound, without actually saying anything at all.

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• Tekton Ticker | 14 Dec 2011

  Instead we see a total lack of familiarity not just with specific issues within the field, but a familiarity with the entire subject itself...However, this is dwarfed by an even bigger error: their refusal to accept correction in the face of multiple stringent criticisms of their lacklustre and slapdash efforts.

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• Mens News Daily | 9 Oct 2010

  He has made the same embarrassing leap from premise to conclusion that Dawkins has made...Its predictions, such as they are, remain almost completely untested, and the most significant of them will probably never even be testable.

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• The Spectator | 11 Sep 2010

  In The Grand Design he aims to give a concise and readable answer to the ‘Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.’...It will come as no surprise to learn that he fails to provide a satisfactory solution to any of them.

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• Challies | 30 Sep 2010

  But the authors then produce their own brand of humanistic philosophy, christen it ‘science’ and base their book upon it....This is postmodernism by the back door and it is wholly inimical to science, which depends on there being a genuine reality to investigate.

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• NPR | 9 Sep 2010

  It’s extremely misleading to promulgate highly speculative theories as the accepted word of the scientific community. Although I have enormous respect for Hawking’s work as a scientist — he’s one of the greatest of our generation without question — this sort of media hype is, to my mind, irresponsible.

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• Militant Atheism Exposed

  ...one cannot help but be mesmerized by how the absurd can be skilfully crafted and made amenable to serious thought, simply because it emanates from a supposedly "brilliant mind." The above statement is so ludicrous that it would receive nothing but laughter and condemnation by any professor, if written by a student in a college paper.

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• COGSCIdotNL | 31 Jan 2011

  Unfortunately, “The Grand Design” does not live up to the hype. The book is entertaining, but there is little to set it apart from the competition.

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• Lamayabooks

  I would highly recommend this book to people with a knack for understanding events happening around us and most importantly to come closer in understanding questions like: Why is there something? Why do we exist? Why this set of natural law?

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• Huffington Post | 8 Sep 2010

  What is the connection of non-locality to M-theory? For them to be silent on the most fundamental aspect of the quantum world, in a theory that purports to be the theory of everything, is a serious shortcoming.

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• Buddhistdoor | 20 Sep 2010

  Such Thought of creation of Stephen Hawking is synonymous with Buddhist doctrine of the nexus of conditional relationships of the interconnected unity of contingent causes and conditions.

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By Brian Lee Kloosterman Jr. 17 Feb 2013