The Grand Design

What Hacker News says

1. hgoelJul 2026
   As an early teen I begged my parents for both A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design. Read both several times. ~15 years later, my parents are still holding on to them and my Dad has read them a couple of times too. It was great reading and played a significant role in my choice of research as a career.

   Never heard of the "people don't actually read it" meme.

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2. dotnet00Apr 2024
   As a 5-10 year old, the books I remember liking the most were on the outer planets, with high quality full page photos of the planets and their moons. Closer to photobooks than books on the solar system targeted at children. One book was just images of the moons, mainly focusing on Saturn, I used to just look at the images and admire them even if initially I didn't quite understand the details. Most of my physics reading came from random sources on the early internet.

   As a 12-13 year old, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design were by far my most memorable reads, although I already had my developing interest in physics by then.

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3. swatkatMar 2016
   I Am That, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

   Freedom from the Known, by Jiddu Krishnamurti

   Think on These Things, by Jiddu Krishnamurti

   The Bhagavad Gita

   The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking

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4. super_marioAug 2012
   Here they are before I forget:

   A Devil's Chaplain

   Are You Living in a Computer Simulation

   Arguing About Gods

   Atheism - The Case Against God

   Atheist Manifest - In Defense of Atheism

   Atheist Universe

   Biblical Cosmology

   Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

   Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief

   Darwin's Dangerous Idea Evolution and the Meanings of Life

   Demon Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark

   Dossier Of Reason

   Evil God Challenge

   Forged

   God - The Failed Hypothesis

   God Is Not Great

   Godless

   History of God

   Jesus Interrupted

   Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

   Letter To A Christian Nation

   Logic and Theism

   Love Thy Neighbour - Evolution of In-group Morality

   Lying

   Misquoting Jesus

   Superstition In All Ages

   The Ascension of Yahweh_ The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism

   The Christian Delusion

   The Dialogues of Plato

   The Early History of Heaven

   The End of Faith

   The Evolution of God

   The God Delusion

   The God Virus How Religion Infects Our Lives And Culture

   The Moral Landscape

   Who Wrote the Bible

   Why I am not a Christian

   These are just some of the books I have read on the subject, but there are others highly rated and recommended that I still want to go through. However, these are really good.

   If this list seems daunting I would recommend a shorter list:

   "Breaking the spell" by Daniel Dennett "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkings "God is not great" by Christopher Hitchens "End of Faith" by Sam Harris

   But books by Steven Hawking "The Grand Design", "Universe from Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss and "Your Inner Fish - A Journey into the 3.5 billion year history of the human body" by Neil Shubin, are also great although somewhat more technical. All other books are softer read.

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5. amichailNov 2010
   The debate as to whether the Earth or sun is the center of the universe was silly. It's all about frames of reference and simplicity of calculations in predicting observations. See "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.
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6. JulianPGoughSep 2026
   Yes, this is a very common, and understandable, question; I get asked it a lot. But in fact new (child) universes aren't constrained in size by the initial energy/mass entering the parent black hole. Actually, that's one of the most attractive aspects of the theory. Universes have a huge reproductive advantage over, say, animals.

   We know that in our own universe, the (positive) mass energy of matter and its (negative) gravitational energy net out to zero. But that means the amount of energy required to build a universe like ours is essentially… well, none. (See Laurence Krauss’s book, A Universe from Nothing; or Stephen Hawking and James Hartle’s 1983 paper, The Wave Function of the Universe, and Hawking’s later book with Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, etc.)

   Child universes are therefore effectively free to produce. Thus, over time, evolution will favor making more (and smaller) black holes from the same amount of matter. Yes, the black holes will get smaller – but the universes they give birth to, through Big Bangs, will still be full sized.

   And universes aren’t constrained by a shared environment with limited resources – newborn universes aren’t all competing in a valley with a limited amount of grass. Indeed, each new universe is entirely self-contained and self-sufficient, being both organism and environment – it supplies its own energy for its own development, efficiently and frugally, through stellar fusion, gravitational collapse, et cetera.

   This means evolution should ultimately favour runaway black hole production. (And that checks out: in the most recent estimate, in 2022, by a team from the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, our universe was estimated to have already generated up to a trillion supermassive black holes – and 40 quintillion stellar-collapse black holes.)

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