stephen hawking and leonard mlodinow the grand design

This line of thinking would continue to be refined, and in early modern times, it became known as the scientific method – a strict system for formulating a hypothesis and rigorously testing it through experiments, measurements and observation. This is how he came up with revolutionary principles like the law of the lever, which explained how small forces can be used to lift heavy objects. While someone like Archimedes wouldn’t be considered a proper scientist today, he was one of the first to conduct experiments and carefully observe and measure the results. These Greek thinkers were devoted to pondering life’s big questions and contemplating the universe, and they began to find ways of understanding the world apart from godly intervention.

It would take the ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle, Archimedes and Thales to move us past this mythological thinking. And when drought or natural disasters befell us, we believed it was due to a failure on our part to adequately please the gods. So, when we were desperate for good weather, we went out of our way to please the appropriate gods. We had sun gods, gods of rain and thunder, even earthquake and volcano gods. While these questions are thousands of years old, the method of using scientific inquiry to get answers is relatively new.īack in ancient times, we used gods to explain the world’s natural phenomena. As long as we’ve been around, we’ve been pondering the big questions: why are we here? Are we alone in the universe? Is there a creator? One of the defining characteristics of human beings is our curiosity.

why we are incredibly lucky to be here.why our “reality” might not be the only one and.why there is no such thing as free will.In this summary of The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, you’ll also learn They will help explain how we know what we know, and hint at what’s still left to discover. This book summary will guide you through a brief history of scientific development.

Be it the interactions of the largest bodies imaginable, like stars or galaxies, or the movements of tiny subatomic particles, scientists are always learning more. In between, science has made great leaps in understanding how the world around us works. Not only does science have an excellent idea as to how the universe was formed, it has also offered us a pretty clear indication of how it might end. If you were to ask a bronze-age “scientist” how the universe began or how it runs, he’d probably answer that it was all the work of various gods. When it comes to our knowledge of the physical world, humanity has made remarkable strides over the last few millennia.

Stephen hawking and leonard mlodinow the grand design