The Grand Design summary

You might be thinking, “Wait a minute, if my decisions can be explained scientifically, doesn’t that go against the idea of free will?”

Indeed, while many people can accept the rules of scientific determinism as it applies to nature, it’s a trickier proposition with respect to human nature.

What do you think a goldfish sees if it lives in a fishbowl in your living room?

This was actually a concern in the city of Monza, Italy. In 2004, the city council outlawed curved fishbowls since they decided that the curved glass would distort the fish’s vision, therefore forcing them to live in a cruelly distorted reality.

While it’s important to remember that everything is relative, this doesn’t mean that any old theory or scientific model should be considered acceptable.

There are four criteria that every good model of reality should adhere to.

So far, we’ve been looking at what’s observable to the naked eye, and for the most part what we see around us is all normal and explainable. But if we could see what is going on around us at the subatomic level, where quantum theory rules, things wouldn’t seem so normal.

One of the most important tenets of quantum physics is the uncertainty principle, established in 1926 by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg.

Albert Einstein was only 26 years old in 1905, the year he turned physics on its head.

With his Theory of Special Relativity, Einstein proved that the way we experience time is also relative.

Nowadays, we have a lot of theories that explain how different things like gravity and quantum particles work, but these separate theories aren’t always compatible. Quantum theory and general relativity, for instance, don’t exactly play well together.

This is something physicists have been struggling with for generations: a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that will link together the four fundamental forces of nature – weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity.

Our existence in the universe has always been a touchy subject, as has the existence of the universe itself. For centuries, the subject of how the universe came to be was dealt with through two schools of thought: those who believed that it always existed and those who believed it was the work of God.

It was only relatively recently that modern science had the tools to explain how the universe began, and how it is expanding, while still adhering to the laws of nature.