Can you hear me......  

I was born on January 8th, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galeelaeo. However, I estimate that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don't know whether any of them were later interested in astronomy. I was born in Oxford, even though my parents were living in London.This was because Oxford was a good place to be born, during World War 2. The Germans had an agreement that they would not bomb Oxford and Cambridge, in return for the British not bombing Heidelberg and ~Got  inggenÉ.

My father came from Yorkshire. His grandfather, my great-grandfather, had been  a wealthy farmer. He had bought too many farms and had gone bankrupt in the agricultural depression at the beginning of this century. This left my father's parents badly off, but they managed to send him to Oxford, where he studied medicine. He then went into research in tropical medicine. He went out to East Africa in 1937. When the war began, he made an over land journey across Africa to get a ship back to England, where he volunteered for military service. He was told, however, that he was more valuable in medical research...  

My mother was born in Glasgow, Scotland, the second child of seven of a family doctor. The family moved south to Devon when she was twelve. Like my father's family, hers was not well off. Nevertheless, they managed to send my mother to Oxford. After  Oxford, she had various jobs, including that of  inspector of taxes, which she did not like. She gave that up to become a secretary. That was how she met  my father in the early years of the war... 

At that time, during and  just after the war, we lived in Highgate, London, an area in which a number of  scientific and academic people also lived. In another country they would  have been called intellectuals, but the English have never admitted to having any intellectuals. My first school was called Byron House School. It was a very progressive school, for those times. I remember complaining to my parents that they weren't teaching me anything. They didn't believe in what was then the accepted way of drilling things ~into you. Instead, you were supposed to learn to read without realizing you were being taught. In the end, I  ~did learn to read, but not until the fairly late age of eight. My sister Phil Ippa was taught to read by more conventional methods, and could read by the age of four. But then, she was definitely brighter than me... 

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house. Fortunately, he was not hurt, and the house was not badly damaged. But for years, there was a large bomb site down the road, on which I used to play with friend Howard, who lived three doors the other way. Howard was a revelation to me, because his parents weren't intellectuals, like the parents of all the other children I knew. He went to the council school, not Byron House, and he knew about football and boxing, sports that my parents wouldn't  have dreamed of following... 

Another early memory was getting my first train set. Toys were not  manufactured during the war, at least not for the home market. But I had a passionate interest in model trains. My father tried making me a wooden train, but that didn't satisfy me, as I wanted something that worked. So my father got a secondhand clockwork train, repaired it with a soldering iron, and gave it to me for Christmas when I was nearly three. That train didn't work very well either. But my father went to America just after the war, and when he came back on the Queen Mary, he brought my mother some nylons, which were not obtainable in Britain at that time. He brought my sister Mary a doll that closed its eyes when you laid it down. And he brought me an American train, complete with a cow catcher and a figure-eight track. I can still remember my excitement as I opened the box...  
 
Later on, in my teens, I built model airplanes and boats. I was never very good with my hands, but I did this with my school friend John McClenahan, who was much better, and whose father had a workshop in their house. My aim was always to build working models that I could control. I didn't care what they looked like. I think it was the same drive that led me to invent a series of very complicated games with another school friend, Roger Ferneyhow. There was a manufacturing game, complete with factories in which units of different colors were made, roads and railways on which they were carried, and a stock market. There was a war game, played on a board of four thousand squares, and even a feudal game, in which each player was a whole dynasty, with a family tree. I think these games, as well as the trains, boats, and airplanes, came from an urge to know how things worked and to control them. Since I began my PHD, this need has been met by my research into cosmology. If you understand how the universe operates, you control it, in a way... 

When we first came to Saint Olbans, I was sent to the High School for Girls, which despite its name took boys up to the age of ten. After I had been there one term, however, my father took one of his almost yearly visits to Africa, this time for a rather longer period of about four months. My mother didn't feel like being left all that time, so she took my two sisters and me to visit her school friend Beryl, who was married to the poet Robert Graves. They lived in a village called Deya, on the Spanish island of Mayorca. This was only five years after the war, and Spain's dictator, Francisco Franco, who had been an ally of Hitler and Mussolini, was still in power. (In fact, he remained in power for another two decades). Nevertheless, my mother, who had been a member of the Young Communist  League before the war, went with three young children by boat and train to Mayorca. We rented a house in Deya, and had a wonderful time. I shared a  tutor with Robert's son, William. This tutor was a protta jay of Robert, and was more interested in writing a play for the Eddin bur festival, than in teaching us. He therefore set us to read a chapter of the Bible each day and write a piece on it. The idea was to teach us the beauty of the English language. We got through all of Genesis and part of Exo dus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this, was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time...  
 
At school, I was never more than about halfway up the class. It was a very bright class. My classwork was very untidy, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers. But my classmates gave me the nickname Einstein, so presumably they saw signs of something better. When I was twelve, one of my friends bet another friend a bag of sweets that I would never come to anything. I don't know if this bet was ever settled, and if so, which way it was decided... 

When I came to the last two years of school, I wanted to specialize in mathematics and physics. There was an inspirational maths teacher, Mr. Tahta, and the school had just built a new maths room, which the maths set had as their classroom. But my father was very much against it. He thought there wouldn't be any jobs for mathematicians, except as teachers. He would really have liked me to do medicine, but I showed no interest in biology, which seemed to me to be too descriptive and not sufficiently fundamental. It also had a rather low status at school. The brightest boys did mathematics and physics; the less bright did biology. My father knew I wouldn't do biology, but he made me do chemistry and only a small amount of mathematics. He felt this would keep my scientific options open. I'm now a professor of mathematics, but I have not had any formal instruction in mathematics since I left Saint Olbans School at the age of seventeen. I have had to pick up what mathematics I know as I went along. I  used to supervise undergraduates at Cambridge, and keep one week ahead of them in the course...  
 
My father was engaged in research in tropical diseases, and he used to take me around his laboratory in Mill Hill. I enjoyed this, especially looking through microscopes. He also used to take me into the insect house, where he kept mosquitoes infected with tropical diseases. This worried me, because there always seemed to be a few mosquitoes flying around loose. He was very hard-working and dedicated to his research. He had a bit of a chip on his shoulder because he felt that other people who were not so good but who had the right background and connections had gotten ahead of him. He used to warn me against such people. But I think physics is a bit different from medicine. It doesn't matter what school you went to, or to whom you are related. It matters what you do... My father was very keen that I should go  to Oxford or Cambridge. He himself had gone to University College, Oxford, so he thought I should apply there, because I would have a greater chance of getting in. At that time, University College had no fellow in mathematics, which was another reason he wanted me to do chemistry. I could try for a scholarship in natural science rather than in mathematics...   

The rest of the family went to Inn dia for a year, but I  had to stay behind  to do A levels and university entrance. My head master thought I was much too young to try for Oxford, but I went up in March 1959 to do the scholarship ek sam with two boys from the year above me at school. I was convinced I had done badly and was very depressed when during the practical exam university lecturers came around to talk to other people but not to me. Then, a few days after I got back from Oxford, I got a telegram to say I had a scholarship... 

I was seven teen, and most of the other students in my year had done military service, and were a lot older. I felt rather lonely during my first year and part of the second. It was only in my third year that I really felt happy there. The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti work. You were supposed to be brilliant without effort, or to accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was regarded as the mark of a gray man, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary... At that time, the physics course at Oxford was arranged in a way that made it particularly easy to  avoid work. I did one ek sam before I went up, then had three years at Oxford with just the final ek sams at the end. I once calculated that I did about a  thousand hours' work in the three years I was there, an average of an hour a  day. I'm not proud of this lack of work. I'm just describing my attitude at the  time, which I shared with most of my fellow students: an attitude of complete  bordom and feeling that nothing was worth making an effort for. One result of my  illness has been to change all that: When you are faced with the possibility of  an early death, it makes you realize that life is worth living, and that there are lots of things you want to do...  

Because of my lack of work, I had planned to get through the final ek sam by doing problems in theoretical physics and avoiding questions that required factual knowledge. I didn't sleep the night before the ek sam because of nervous tension, however, so I didn't do very well. I was on the borderline between a  first- and second class degree, and I had to be interviewed by the examiners to determine which I should get. In the interview they asked me about my future plans. I replied that I wanted to do research. If they gave me a first, I would go to Cambridge. If I only got a second, I would stay in Oxford. They gave me a first...   

I was always very interested in how things operated, and used to take them apart to see how they worked, but I was not so good at putting them back together again. My practical abilities never matched up to my theoretical enquiries. My father encouraged my interest in science, and he even coached me in mathematics, until I got to a stage beyond his knowledge. With this background, and my father's job, I took it as natural that I would go into scientific research. In my early years, I didn't differentiate between one kind of science and another. But from the age of thirteen or fourteen, I knew I wanted to do research in physics because it was the most fundamental science. 
 
This was despite the fact that physics was the most boring subject at school, because it was so easy and obvious. Chemistry was much more fun, because unexpected things, like explosions, kept happening. But physics and astronomy offered the hope of understanding where we came from, and why we were here. I wanted to fathom the far depths of the universe. Maybe I have succeeded to a small extent, but there's still plenty I want to know...  
 
I arrived in Cambridge at DAMTP, the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics. I had applied to work with Fred Hoyle, the principal defender of the steady state theory, and the most famous British astronomer of the time. I say astronomer, because cosmology was at that time, hardly recognized as a legitimate field, yet that was where I wanted to do my research, inspired by having been on a summer course with Hoyle's student, Jayant Narlikar. However, Hoyle had enough students already, so to my great disappointment, I was assigned to Dennis sharma, of whom I had not heard. But it was probably for the best. Hoyle was away a lot, seldom in the department, and I wouldn't have had much of his attention. Sharma, on the other hand, was usually around, and ready to talk.I didn't agree with many of his ideas, particularly on Mach's principle, but that stimulated me to develop my own picture...  
 
When I began research, the two areas that seemed exciting, were cosmology, and elementary particle physics. Elementary particles was the active, rapidly changing field, that attracted most of the best minds, while cosmology and general relativity, were stuck where they had been in the 1930s. The famous physicist, Richard Feinman, has given an amusing account of attending the conference on general relativity and gravitation, in Warsaw in 1962. In a letter to his wife, he said. 'I am not getting anything out of the meeting.I am learning nothing. Because there are no experiments,  this field is not an active one, so few of the best men are doing work in it. The result is that there are hosts of dopes here, 126, and it is not good for my blood  pressure. Remind me not to come to any more gravity conferences...   

I hadn't done much mathematics in the very easy physics course at Oxford, so Sharma suggested I work on astrophysics. But having been cheated out of working with Hoyle, I wasn't going to do something boring like Faraday rotation.I had come to Cambridge to do cosmology, and cosmology I was determined to do. So I red old text books on general relativity, and traveled up to lectures at Kings College, London each week, with three other students of Sharma. I followed the words and equations, but I didn't really get a feel for the subject. Also, I had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease, or ALS, and given to expect I didn't have long enough to finish my PhD. Then suddenly, towards the end of my second year of research, things picked up. My disease  wasn't progressing much, and my work all fell into place, and I began to get somewhere... 

Sharma was very keen on Mach's  principle, the idea that objects owe their inertia, to the influence of all the other matter in the universe. He tried to get me to work on this, but I felt his formulations of Mach's principle, were not well defined. However, he introduced me to something a bit similar with regard to light, the so called Wheeler Feinman electro dynamics. This said that electricity and magnetism, were time symmetric. However, when one switched on a lamp, it was the influence of all the other matter in the universe, that caused light waves to travel outward from the lamp, rather than come in from infinity, and end on the lamp. For Wheeler Feinman electro dynamics to work, it was necessary that all the light traveling out from the lamp, should be absorbed by other matter in the universe. This would happen in a steady state universe, in which the density of matter would remain constant, but not in a big bang universe, where the density would go down as the universe expanded. It was claimed that this was another proof, if proof were needed, that we live in a steady state universe. There was a conference on Wheeler Feinman electro dynamics and the arrow of time, in Cornell in 1963. Feinman was so disgusted by the nonsense that was talked about the arrow of time, that he refused to let his name appear in the proceedings. He was referred to as Mr X, but everyone knew who X was... 

The big question in cosmology in the early 60s, was, did the universe have a beginning. Many scientists were instinctively opposed to the idea, because  they felt that a point of creation, would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God, to determine how the universe would start off. Two alternative scenarios were therefore put forward. One was the steady state theory, in which as the universe expanded, new matter was continually created to keep the density constant on average. The steady state theory was never on a very strong theoretical basis, because it required a negative energy field to create the matter. This would have made it unstable, to run away production of matter and negative energy. But it had the great merit as a scientific theory, of making definite predictions that could be tested by  observations. By the time I began my research, the steady state theory was already in trouble. Martin Ryle's radio astronomy group at the Cavendish did a  survey of faint  radio sources. They found the sources were distributed fairly uniformly across the sky. This indicated that they were probably outside our  galaxy, because otherwise they would be concentrated along the Milky Way. But the graph of the number of sources against source strength, did not agree with  the prediction of the steady state theory. There were too many faint sources, indicating that the density of sources was higher in the distant past. Hoyle and  his supporters, put forward increasingly contrived explanations of the  observations, but the final nail in the coffin of the steady state theory, came with the discovery of a faint background of microwave radiation. This could not  be accounted for in the steady state theory, though Hoyle and Narlikar tried desperately. It was just as well I hadn't been a student of Hoyle, because I  would have had to have defended the steady state... 

The  microwave background, indicated that the universe had had a hot dense stage, in the past. But it didn't prove that was the beginning of the universe. One might  imagine that the universe had had a previous contracting phase, and that it had bounced from contraction to expansion, at a high, but finite density. This was clearly a fundamental question, and it was just what I needed to complete my PhD thesis... 

Gravity pulls matter together, but rotation throws it apart. So my first question was, could rotation cause the universe to bounce. Together with George Ellis, I was able to show that the answer was no, if the universe was spatially homogeneous, that is, if it was the same at each point of space. However, two Russians, Lifshitz and Khalatnikov, had claimed to have proved that a general contraction without exact symmetry, would always lead  to a bounce, with the density remaining finite. This result was very convenient for Marxist Leninist dialectical materialism, because it avoided awkward questions about the creation of the universe. It therefore became an article of faith for Soviet scientists...
  
Lifshitz and Khalatnikov were members of the old school in general relativity. That is, they wrote down a  massive system of equations, and tried to guess a solution. But it wasn't clear  that the solution they found, was the most general one. A new approach was  introduced by Roger Penrose, which didn't require solving the field equations explicitly, just certain general properties, such as that energy is positive, and gravity is attractive. Penrose gave a seminar in Kings College, London, in January 1965. I wasn't at the seminar, but I heard about it from Brandon Carter, with whom I shared an office in the then new DAMTP premises in silver street. At  first, I couldn't understand what the point was. Penrose had showed that once a dieing star had contracted to a certain radius, there would inevitably be a  singularity, a point where space and time came to an end. Surely, I thought, we already knew that nothing could prevent a massive cold star, collapsing under  its own gravity until it reached a singularity of infinite density. But in fact, the equations had been solved, only for the collapse of a perfectly spherical star. Of course, a real star won't be exactly spherical. If Lifshitz and Kalatnikov were right, the departures from spherical symmetry would grow as the star collapsed, and would cause different parts of the star to miss each other, and avoid a singularity of infinite density. But Penrose showed they were wrong. Small departures from spherical symmetry, will not prevent a singularity... 

I realized that similar arguments could be applied to the expansion of the universe. In this case, I could prove there were singularities where spacetime had a beginning. So again, Lifshitz and Khalatnikov were wrong. General relativity predicted that the universe should have a beginning, a result that did not pass unnoticed by the Church... 

In the first few years of my research, my main interest was in the big bang singularity of cosmology, rather than the singularities that Penrose had shown would occur in collapsing stars. But a bit later, Werner Israel, produced an important result. He showed that unless the remnant from a collapsing star was exactly spherical, the singularity it contained would be naked, that is, it would be visible to outside observers. This would have meant that the break down of general relativity at the singularity of a collapsing star, would destroy our ability to predict the future of the rest of the universe...   

At first, most people, including Israel himself, thought that this implied that because real stars aren't spherical, their collapse would give rise to naked singularities, and break down of predictability. But a different interpretation was put forward by Roger Penrose and John Wheeler. It was that there is Cosmic Censorship. This says that Nature is a prude, and hides singularities in black holes, where they can't be seen. I used to have a bumper sticker, black holes are out of sight, on the door of my office... 

My work on black holes began with a Eureka moment a few days after the birth of my daughter, Lucy. While getting into bed, I realized that I could apply to black holes, the causal structure theory I had developed for singularity theorems. In particular, the area of the horizon, the boundary of the black hole, would  always increase. When two black holes collide and merge, the area of the final black hole, is greater than the sum of the areas of the original holes. This suggested that the area was like what is called, the entropy of a black hole. It would be a measure of  how many states a black hole could have on the inside, for the same appearance on the outside. But  the area couldn't actually ~be  the entropy, because as everyone knew, black holes were completely black, and couldn't be in equilibrium with thermal radiation...  
 
There was a Golden Age in which we solved most of the major problems in black  hole theory. This was before there was any observational evidence for black holes, which shows Feinman was wrong when he said an active field has to be  experimentally driven. The one problem that was never solved, was to prove the  Cosmic Censorship hypothesis, though a number of attempts to disprove it, failed. It is fundamental to all work on black holes, so I have a strong vested  interest in it being true. I therefore have a bet with Kip Thorne and John  Preskill. It is difficult for me to win this bet, but quite possible to lose, by  finding a counter example with a naked singularity. In fact, I have already lost  an earlier version of the bet, by not being careful enough about the wording. They were not amused by the T-shirt I offered in settlement... 

We were so successful with the classical general theory of relativity, that I was at a bit of a loose end after the publication with George Ellis, of  our book, The Large Scale Structure Of Spacetime. My work with Penrose, had shown that general relativity broke down at singularities. So the obvious next  step, would be to combine general relativity, the theory of the very large, with  quantum theory, the theory of the very small. I had no background in quantum theory, and the singularity problem seemed too difficult for a frontal assault  at that time. So as a warm up exercise, I considered how particles and fields  governed by quantum theory, would behave near a black hole. In particular, I wondered, can one have atoms, in which the nucleus is a tiny primordial black  hole, formed in the early universe.To answer this, I studied how quantum  fields  would scatter off a black hole.I was expecting that part of an incident wave  would be absorbed, and the remainder scattered. But to my great surprise, I found  there seemed to be emission from the black hole. At first, I thought this must be a mistake in my calculation. But what persuaded me that it was real, was that the emission was exactly what was required, to identify the area of the horizon,  with the entropy of a black hole. It is summed up in this simple formula, which  expresses the entropy, in terms of the area of the horizon. and the three fundamental constants of nature, c, the speed of light, G, Newton's constant of  gravitation, and h bar, Plancks constant. I'm proud to have discovered it...   

The Radiation from a black hole, will carry away energy, so the black hole will lose mass, and shrink. Eventually, it seems the black hole will evaporate completely, and disappear. This raised a  problem that struck at the  heart of physics. My calculation showed that the radiation was exactly thermal and random, as it has to be, if the area of the horizon, is to be the entropy of  the black hole. So how could the radiation left over, carry all the information about what made the black hole. But if information is lost, this is incompatible with quantum mechanics. This paradox had been argued for thirty years, without  much progress, until I found what I think is its resolution. Information is not  lost, but it is not returned in a useful way. It is like burning an  encyclopedia. Information is not lost, but it is very hard to read. In fact, Kip Thorne and I, had a bet with John Preskill on the information paradox. I gave  John a baseball encyclopedia. Maybe I should have just given him the ashes...   

I had been working mainly on black black holes, but my interest in cosmology was renewed by the suggestions that the early universe had  gone through a period of inflationary expansion, in which its size grew at an  ever increasing rate, like the way prices go up in the shops. Euclidean methods, were the obvious way to describe fluctuations and phase transitions, in  an inflationary universe. We held a Nuffield work shop in Cambridge, attended by all the major players in the field. At this meeting, we established most of our present picture of inflation, including the all important density fluctuations, which give rise to galaxy formation, and so to our existence. This was ten years  before fluctuations in the microwave were observed, so again in gravity, theory  was ahead of experiment... 

The original scenario for  inflation, was that the universe began with a big bang singularity. As the  universe expanded, it was supposed somehow to get into an inflationary state. I  thought this was unsatisfactory, because all equations would break down at a singularity. But unless one knew what came out of the initial singularity, one could not calculate how the universe would develop. Cosmology would not have any  predictive power. What was needed was a space time a without singularity, like in the Euclidean version of a black hole... 

After the work shop in Cambridge, I spent the summer at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara, which had just been set up. I talked to Jim Hartle, about how to apply the Euclidean approach to cosmology. According to the Euclidean approach, the wave function of the universe, is given by a Feinman sum over a certain class of histories in imaginary time. Because imaginary time behaves like  another direction in space, histories in imaginary time can be closed surfaces, like the surface of the Earth, with no beginning or end. Jim and I decided that this was the most natural choice of class, indeed the ~only natural choice. We formulated the no boundary proposal: the boundary condition of the universe, is that it has no boundary.  We had side stepped the scientific and philosophical difficulty of time having a beginning, by turning it into a direction in space...  

The no boundary condition implies that the universe will  be spontaneously created out of nothing. It will start out almost completely smooth, but with tiny departures. These will grow as the universe expands, and will lead to the formation of galaxies, stars, and  all the structure in the  universe, including living beings. The no boundary condition is the key to  creation, the reason we are here... 

Some time ago, I wrote  a popular book, A Brief History of Time. The book described my picture of the  universe, but it left a number of issues unresolved. I have therefore written a  new book, the Grand Design, with Leonard Mlodninov, to try to answer questions like, How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?  What is the  nature of reality?  How does the universe behave, and why does it exist. Does  it need a Creator. Most of us don't worry about these questions most of the
time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder, Why are we here. Where do we come from? Traditionally these are questions for Philosophy, but Philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. The purpose of the Grand Design is to give the answers that are suggested by recent discoveries. They lead us to a new and very different picture of the universe, and our place in it...  

The laws of science describe ~how the universe behaves, but to understand the universe at the deepest level, we also need to understand ~why. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws, and not some other...  

The answer to all these questions, is M-theory. M-theory is the only unified theory which has all the properties that we think the final theory ought to have. It is not a theory in the usual sense, but it is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of  physical situations. It is a bit like a map. As is well known, one cannot show  the whole of the Earth's surface on a single map; the usual Mercator projection used for maps of the world makes
areas appear larger and larger in the far north and south, and doesn't cover the North and South poles. Instead one has to use a collection of maps, each of which covers a limited region. The maps overlap each other, and where they do, they show the same landscape. M-theory is similar. The different theories in the M-theory family may look very  different, but they can all be regarded as limiting cases of the same underlying theory, when certain quantities such as the energy or some fields are small. Each theory has only a limited range of validity, but where the ranges of two theories overlap, they predict the same observations. There is no single theory, that is a good representation of observations in all situations... 
 
M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some Supernatural Being, or God. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally,  from physical law. They are a prediction of science. Each universe has many  possible histories, and many possible states at later times, that is, at times  like the present, long after their creation. Most of these states will be quite unlike the universe we observe, and quite unsuitable for the existence of any form of life. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Thus, our presence selects out from this vast array, only those universes that are compatible with our existence. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the Cosmos, this makes us, in a sense, the Lords of creation... 
 
M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to  find. The fact that we, humans who are ourselves mere collections of  fundamental particles of nature, have been able to come this close to an  understanding of the laws governing us and our universe, is a great triumph. But perhaps the true miracle, is that abstract considerations of logic, lead to a unique theory, that predicts and describes a vast universe, full of the  amazing variety that we see. If the theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3,000 years. We will have found the Grand Design...

Thank you for listening to me