#54 in Popular science
The Grand Design
- 208
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“The Grand Design” is a short, ambitious work of popular science that sets out to answer why there is a universe at all. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow go from relativity and particle physics to M-theory in some two hundred pages. Some readers enjoy the opening survey, then lose the thread midway and feel the argument leans too heavily on what they see as a purely hypothetical multiverse.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Grand Design is a popular-science book written by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and published by Bantam Books in 2010. The book examines the history of scientific knowledge about the universe and explains eleven-dimensional M-theory. The authors of the book point out that a Unified Field Theory may not exist.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.7 across 187 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 56% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Popular science average of 8.3. That is how 7.9 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.3 | 24 | 13% |
| Google Books | 5.0 | 5 | 3% |
| Hardcover | 7.8 | 158 | 85% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Grand Design?
It has 208 pages — shorter than 92% of the ranked books in Popular science.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Popular science — with scores between 7.9 and 8.0, closest to this book.
