God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse: What Hawking said, and why it matters

List of plates xi
Acknowledgements xii
1 Project Shangri-La 1
The icon 5
The book 7
Big Questions 9
Where do we go from here? 10
2 Tunguska 13
Elementary, my dear Aristotle 15
It's all Greek to me 17
This most beautiful system 19
Force fields and the art of science 22
Light and momentary troubles 25
A space-, time- and mind-bending solution 28
Hawking, relativity and those Big Questions 30
3 Canoe man 33
A case for the defence 34
The beginning of the end 35
Hooke versus Newton revisited 36
But together they do 38
Young strikes again 39
Weirdness, weirdness, everywhere 41
A matter of interpretation 42
Contents
Heisenberg, histories and Hawking 45
Closing argument 47
4 Gingerich's quest 50
All that nonsense 51
The book nobody read 53
Holding the universe still 54
The 1920s' Copernicus #1 55
The 1920s' Copernicus #2 57
Redshifting opinions 58
The discarded image 59
A cooling-off period 60
The small matter of nucleosynthesis 61
Digging the cosmological heels in 63
Brainwaves and microwaves 64
Cosmology and salvation 66
5 Batman Forever? 80
The clash of the titans 81
Why can't you two just get along?! 82
Separation anxiety 84
The dark star 86
Where QM and GR meet 88
Hawking destroys the universe 91
QM versus GR - the infinite battleground 94
Hawking the hero 98
6 Part 1 101
Akira Yoshida 101
Unification 102
The grand unified theory 103
Contents
Putting the heat on 105
Just how far can we take this? 107
A new hope 111
Black holes ain't so black 112
Hawking radiation 114
Securing a legacy 116
Trouble in Paradise 117
6 Part 2 121
Mathematical dogfights 121
Imagine that 122
Waves, particles, probabilities, histories 124
Hawking goes big 126
A disclaimer 129
Extraordinary measures 130
Extraordinary times 131
A theory of (almost) everything 133
Multiverses, metaphysics and myths 136
7 Tyres and anchors 139
Counter-punches 141
Crossing the divide 141
Is philosophy dead? 144
You Kant be serious!? 147
Being critical about realism 150
A rose by any other name 151
One foot in each camp 152
Introducing the multiverse 154
Creating history 157
Hawking and God 159
Switching the spotlight 161
Contents
8 The Test of Solomon 163
What about singularities? 163
What about Hawking radiation? 165
What about the no-boundary proposal? 167
No rescue 168
What about model-dependent realism? 172
What about the multiverse? 174
Infinite death 178
What about God? 180
Different universes 182
Big Answers 185
Appendix 1: A note on M-theory 188
Appendix 2: A universe from nothing 191
Notes 195
Acknowledgements 206
Index 207