The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

The Grand Design is a very lovely book published by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in 2010 to discuss the overlapping theories of physics.

It’s a very nice read, I think there are some silly conclusions about how there is no God at the end but the reason I love the book is the very elegant explanation of a coined term “model-dependent realism”. The concept is that when there are overlapping theories of the world, we are probably missing a simpler reality.

I’ve included the image from the book below because I think it is one of the most important concepts I have ever seen in science and I love that Stephen Hawking was the person to write it down in such a lovely fashion.

The fish can either assume the world around him is curved and strange and wonderful ways, or he lives in a fishbowl.