Modern physics leaves no place for God in the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded in a new work entitled: "The Grand Design", co-authored by American physicist Leonard Mlodinow.
In the new work to be released September 9th, Professor Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity, contesting Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have created out of chaos.
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," Hawking writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have risen from chaos was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.
Hawking resigned as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University last year after 30 years in the position, a post previously held by Newton.
More from Alan Boyle at MSNBC.
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