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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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The Grand Design summary
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
How science unlocked the secrets of the universe
19 mins
Table of Contents
The Grand Design
Summary of 8 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 8
The quest to explain our world took us from the mythological to the scientific.
One of the defining characteristics of human beings is our curiosity. 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?
While these questions are thousands of years old, the method of using scientific inquiry to get answers is relatively new.
Back in ancient times, we used gods to explain the world’s natural phenomena. We had sun gods, gods of rain and thunder, even earthquake and volcano gods.
So, when we were desperate for good weather, we went out of our way to please the appropriate gods. And when drought or natural disasters befell us, we believed it was due to a failure on our part to adequately please the gods.
It would take the ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle, Archimedes and Thales to move us past this mythological thinking. 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.
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. 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.
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.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scholars like Galileo, Johannes Kepler and René Descartes were early proponents of the scientific method. Isaac Newton used this system to formulate the laws of gravity and motion, which finally allowed us to understand the movements of planets and stars.
Eventually, scientists would use the scientific method to explain how all of the physical world functions.
This led us to scientific determinism, the belief that every occurrence in nature can be scientifically explained – even human decisions.
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What is The Grand Design about?
The Grand Design (2010) tells the fascinating story of how humans came into being and how we began to use the scientific method to explain both our remarkable growth as a species and the world around us. From the foundational laws of Newton and Einstein to the mind-bending science of quantum physics, find out how far we’ve come and how close we are to answering life’s big questions.
Best quote from The Grand Design
. . . philosophy is dead. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
—Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Who should read The Grand Design?
- Armchair philosophers
- Science geeks who are into astronomy and physics
- Anyone who’s ever wondered about the mysteries of life
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