THE GRAND DESIGN

HOT, sunny beginning for September on the 2nd; a glorious Saturday that I spent at Farran Park, watching the lovely dogs in the conformation rings. It was at least 30°C!

Monday the 4th is much colder (16°C); an overcast gray day. This combination of sun and rain made the grass grow like crazy in 4 days.

Gray weather invites me to snuggle up with Terri & Flower and a good book. The great book that I'm reading now is The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. It's a marvelous overview connecting ideas and theories in physics from Newton's gravity through Feynman's view of quantum theory to M-theory; from the quarks that form protons and neutrons to the expanding universe/multiverse. With this model-dependent perspective of reality under your belt, various physics theories seem to fit into the jigsaw puzzle of Life, The Universe, and Everything more understandably. As some critics say, Hawking and Mlodinow may be too confident about M-theory and it may be trashed in the future but for this time and place in our universe, I like how well they explain all the concepts. June 19, 2012: Came across this set of pages about The Grand Design ... http://www.livescience.com/18035-stephen-hawking-book-physics.html