Umberto “Name of the Rose“ Eco (not the person you’d immediately expect to not like Stephen Hawking’s latest effort, The Grand Design) apparently doesn’t like it. That’s according to Vox Day’s translation from the Italian.
Yes, for one thing, Eco thinks the book was mostly written by co-author Cal Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow:
the book is fundamentally a work of the second author, whose qualifications are described on the cover as having written some episodes of “Star Trek”.UD News would pay no attention to such speculations, but for the fact that Eco is a writer by trade (and a very accomplished one), and writers excel at picking apart different voices in a multi-authored work.
Anyway, Eco has a number of more germane beefs:
The work begins with the fixed affirmation that philosophy no longer has anything to say and only physics can explain:
1)How we can comprehend the world in which we find ourselves.
2)The nature of reality.
3)If the universe had need of a creator.
4)Why there is something instead of nothing.
5)Why we exist.
6)Why this particular set of laws exists instead of some other.As you see these are typical philosophical questions, but it must be admitted that the book demonstrates how physics can, in some ways, serve to answer the last four, which appear to be the most philosophical of all.
The problem is that in order to attempt to answer the last four questions, it is necessary to have answered the first two. It is those questions which, in a large way, are what one requires in order to say that something is real and if we know the real world as it is.
– “Eco on Hawking,” June 26, 2011
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