Stephen Hawkings Grand Designs [DVD]

Mind blowing stuff but explained for anyone to understand , this man is Albert Einstein of our time , everybody should watch this.

This DVD Is absalutly brilliant! I recomend it to any one who like space and phisics and stuff like That! :)

The DVD offers three chapters, the beginning of the universe, the meaning of life and the key to the cosmos.

Different from what you might expect, Hawking develops the entire set on the question of the existence of God and life after death, hence trying to scientifically falsify the essential religious foundation, spitting into the face of billions of people all over the world.

In trying to do so, he recalls some dark pages of church's history, hence does not even try to distinguish between church and God. His examples are Galileo Galilei and his own experience, when the church requested that science should not analyse the Big Bang, this being the act of creation.

Now, as Hawking brings forward his "cookbook of the cosmos", his ingredients are matter, energy and space; an interesting sequence where the essential ingredient of time is missing.
Hawking proposes an unusual analogy to explain space, which is an indefinitely large sea, having a drain which forms a vortex, forcing a boat into a curve around it. In doing so, he looses Einstein's fundamental analogy of thinking of gravity as a geometrical property of space, which is usually represented by a large sheet of latex, which is curved by masses according to their amount.

This is not the only problem. Hawking has a fondness for introducing his very own and unique physics to "prove" that the universe has jumped out of nothing, not requiring any God for its existence. Not only does he simply apply the rules of quantum mechanics to a very different and not applicable scenario. In proposing "negative" energy, which exactly balances the positive energy of our universe, he claims that the total energy of the universe stays zero. He uses another analogy, which sees a worker building up an earth hill, where the hill represents the positive mass-energy, the hole the negative one; the worker remains out of the interpretation. The worker is as ignored as the laws of energy- and matter conservation, as are the consequences when applied to the well known typical equations describing energy, where then a negative mass (not to be confused with antimatter) or a negative frequency would need to exist.

Then, Hawking maintains his theory, which he puts forward as undisputed fact, that the universe had its beginnning out of nothing with the Big Bang, also starting time just then.
However, some twenty years ago, Abhay Ashtekar and Martin Bojowald have described the development of a predecessing universe, collapsing and bouncing into our own; hence it is at least probable that our universe was at least not the beginning of time itself.

Hawkings conclusion is that there is no God necessary to explain our cosmos (beginninng and existence), as science has an explanation for everything - which is obviously a grand error (instead of his grand design).
This is quite the same attitude some Sovjet scientists had a couple of decades ago when they claimed that despite thorough investigations of corpses, they could not find the soul.

Now, Hawking may of course believe in whatever he wants. But holding the Lucasian Chair carries a specific responsibility; unfortunately, he acts far from any shadow of such a responsibility here.

Moreover, when looking at the meaning of life, Hawking shows that biology is not exactly his forte. Self-awareness is not so characteristic for the human species as he wants to make us believe. As for the free will, brain scientists have long ago come to very interesting actions of the brain which Hawking is obviously unaware of. So, there is hardly anything revealing in this chapter.

Finally, when trying to find the key of the cosmos, there is this promising route of string theory, integrated by (Ed Witten's) M-Theory. It is almost fascinating how superficial Hawking scetches out this quite challenging theory (especially when having studied eg. Brian Greene or Ed Witten before). Not only does Hawking maintain that the string theory explains everything (up to and including the non-existence of God), he simply fails to explain even the basic facts to set up as much as a shadow of a hint which might support his outrageous theory. In going deeper into string theory, he would have had to admit that so far, string theory has not succeeded to develop an explanation for the implementation of the constants and laws of nature. The inner workings of the universe remain mysterious.
However, as current mainstream demands, Hawking also suggests that there is not just one universe, but countless multiverses out there; of course, far away from any scientific rationale, which is at least currently not available.

In short:
To mix religion and science is not only unethical, it is not even scientific at all.
Apart from the few examples above, the scientific contents are too often questionable (at least).
Most certainly, this is the last time I've bought any product from Hawking.