EXCERPT: Stephen Hawking's 'Grand Design'

Sept. 7, 2010— -- In their new book, "The Grand Design," physicists Stephen Hawking and Len Mlodinow tackle the ultimate meaning of life questions: why does the universe behaves the way it does and why do we exist? One theory the two have ruled on is that God had nothing to do with it.

Read an excerpt of the book below and head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.

From Chapter 1: The Mystery of Being

Until the advent of modern physics it was generally thought that all knowledge of the world could be obtained through direct observation, that things are what they seem, as perceived through our senses.

But the spectacular success of modern physics, which is based upon concepts such as Feynman's that clash with everyday experience, has shown that that is not the case. The naive view of reality therefore is not compatible with modern physics. To deal with such paradoxes we shall adopt an approach that we call model-dependent realism.

It is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental elements and concepts.

If two such physical theories or models accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.

In the history of science we have discovered a sequence of better and better theories or models, from Plato to the classical theory of Newton, to modern quantum theories. It is natural to ask: Will this sequence eventually reach an end point, an ultimate theory of the universe, that will include all forces and predict every observation we can make, or will we continue forever finding better theories, but never one that cannot be improved upon?

We do not yet have a definitive answer to this question, but we now have a candidate for the ultimate theory of everything, if indeed one exists, called M-theory.

M-theory is the only model that has all the properties we think the final theory ought to have, and it is the theory upon which much of our later discussion is based.