The Grand Design of the Universe

I have been reading this novel, “The Grand Design” written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, that gives an insight into the various mysteries of nature, the laws that govern it, the theories that have been devised to understand its phenomena and it reality challenges the very perception of reality. This is a truly ‘mind blowing stuff’ as was quoted by the Sunday Times.
I would definitely like to mention a few points from the book I myself found fascinating and intrigued my senses.
1. There are so many things about this universe we often wonder about. How does the universe behave? Did the universe need a creator? What is the nature of reality? Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. It has failed to keep up with the modern developments in science more particularly, physics, & the book aims to give answers suggested by recent discoveries and inventions.
2. Ignorance of Nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent Gods and deties. When the Gods were pleased, mankind was treated with good weather, peace and freedom from natural disaster and disease. Otherwise, there would be droughts, wars, diseases, pestilence, volcanoes etc. But with Thales of Miletus, 2600 years ago, that idea began to change. It was slowly realised that nature follows laws which can be deciphered!
3. Several effective theories have been developed since ancient times, such as chemistry, economics, the Newton’s laws etc. An effective theory is a framework that is developed to model certain observed phenomena without describing in detail all of the underlying processes. E.g. we can provide an adequate explanation for interactions of various atoms and molecules in a chemical reaction (Chemistry) without actually accounting for every detail of the reaction.
4. A model is a good model if it
a. Is elegant
b. Contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements
c. Agrees with and explains all existing observations
d. Makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.
To paraphrase Einstein, a theory should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. This makes it elegant!
5. If we perform the Davison- Germer’s famous double slit experiment, but fire photons one at a time, we obtain the same interference pattern as we would have got using electrons ( or buckyballs). This was a startling revelation: The wave nature of light is not a property of the beam or of a large collection of photons, but that of individual particles!

6. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle’s basic jist lies in the fact that the more precisely you measure speed the less precise would be the measurement of position and vice versa. Or the outcome of physical processes can not be determined with certainty. Nature does not dictate the outcome of any process or experiment, even in the simplest of situations. It is to paraphrase Einstein as if God throws the dies before deciding the results of any physical process. Quantum Physics seems to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws but it is not the case. It leads us to accept a new form of determinism: given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts with certainty.
The explanation of quantum theory is so amazing in this book that you don’t have to be a physics pro to understand it. All you need is an open mind. Feynman appears to me as the God of quantum theory having thought so out of the box that it becomes difficult to swallow, yet his propositions have been tested time and again and found true. The Grand design is a book that will inform and provoke like no other!