Something can be created from nothing

One of the presumptions of The Grand Design is that something can be created from nothing.

In mind of the line from the movie "The Sound of Music": "Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could", we know that it is a foundational assumption of human thought that everything has a cause. And if you define a perfect vacuum in space as nothing, then it seems a compelling presumption that this vacuum could not produce anything.

But such a perfect vacuum may not exist. One of the foundations of quantum theory is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It begins to be of profound importance to our understanding of nature at the atomic scale and below. One of the most direct implications is that it requires a larger amount of confinement energy to contain a particle in a smaller volume. If you compare the confinement energy for an electron in an atom to the energy required to hold it in a nucleus, you find that you can't hold an electron in a nucleus.

If you envision trying to trap a particle into a smaller and smaller volume, you find that the confinement energy becomes so great that the system is unstable with respect to pair production of various particle-antiparticle pairs such as electrons and positrons. If you put enough energy into a system, it can produce particle-antiparticle pairs in accordance with the Einstein equation E=mc2.

So particle-antiparticle pairs can be created from "nothing", that is from no particles to two particles, but energy must be provided, so these particles can be viewed as having been created from the energy. And that required energy is not "nothing", so a vacuum that produced particles would nevertheless require available energy to convert into the particles.

The whole universe can be created from nothing.

One of the presumptions of The Grand Design is that the universe creates itself.

In order to contemplate the universe creating itself from nothing, you must first accept the proposition that something can be created from nothing . That is tenable only in the quantum realm, so applying it to the universe presumes a quantum scale for the universe. If we track the big bang backward to a stage when it was less than an atomic diameter, then the whole universe must be treated by quantum mechanical methods. At a scale far below the size of a nucleus, if we envision the universe as proceeding from a singularity, you would have a sizzling sea of quarks, with particles and antiparticles continually being created and annihilatiing one another.

Hawking's position as I understand it is that with the nature of gravity and the fact that gravititational potential energy is negative. As the universe expands the gravity energy becomes less negative and in the case of our nearly "flat" universe will approach zero. So if I understand it correctly, no additional energy compared to the vacuum would be needed and the universe could create itself.

One of the real problems here is that you are in the realm of quantum gravity, which no one, not even Hawking, claims to understand. To me, it also seems to be a problem to invoke gravitational potential energy back in the early stages where mass may not have been a characteristic of the particles if the Higgs mechanism acting later was responsibile for particles having mass.

The universe has all possible histories.

One of the presumptions of The Grand Design is that the universe has all possible histories.

This kind of idea comes out of the "sum over histories" formulation of quantum mechanics. This approach is credited to Feynmann. It is defended in relation to a double slit experiment with quantum particles where the wave nature of the particles leads to an interference pattern like the double slit experiment with waves. They make the stretch: "More generally, instead of just a single particle Feynman's theory allows us to predict the probable outcomes of a "system" which could be a particle, as set of particles, or even the whole universe." p80

Surely they are not stretching so far as to suggest that the present universe can be treated in such a manner, but the early universe when it was so small that it fit in the realm of quantum physics would have wave properties and the speculation has merit. Once the unverse became macroscopic, then I can't see that it fits at all under that umbrella. And many of the contingencies on the way to producing a habitable planet don't fit into this picture in any easily conceivable way.

Generally speaking, we expect quantum wave behavior to be significant when the scale of the experiment is on the order of the Debroglie wavelength of the system or particle. The Debroglie wavelength of a baseball is 10-34m, so you don't use quantum methods unless you are within that distance, which is a quintillion times smaller than a nucleus, so "sum over histories" doesn't apply to a baseball and certainly not to the present universe.

The past can be changed by the present.

One of the presumptions of The Grand Design is that the past can be changed by the present.

This kind of idea comes out of the sum over histories approach to quantum mechanics and depends upon a particular type of quantum experiment where it appears that an intervention in the system changes its history.

p82 "observations you make on a system affect its past." This refers to the ideas of Wheeler, interesting since Wheeler thought we made the past.

p83 "We will see that, like a particle, the universe doesn't have just a single history, but every possible history, each with its own probability; and our observations of its current state affect its past and determine the different histories of the universe, just as the observations of the particles in the double-slit experiment affect the particles' past."

The instances where the sum over histories method have been used, like the sum over Feynmann diagrams, are in my understanding those where you are legitimately within the range where quantum phenomena are significant.

Human free will is an illusion.

p31 Ridicules free will under the presumption that it had to arise by evolution alone.

"Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets."

"It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is detrmined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is an illusion."

There are no miracles.

p34 "This book is rooted in the concept of scientific determinism, which implies that the answer to question two is that there are no miracles, or exceptions to the laws of nature."

Material causes are the only causes.

p34 "This book is rooted in the concept of scientific determinism, which implies that the answer to question two is that there are no miracles, or exceptions to the laws of nature." Later in the same paragraph,
"do we really have reason to believe that an objective reality exists?"
This seems like a swing from total philosophical materialism to some kind of weird non-materialism, all in one paragraph!

p 42 "There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality."

Natural systems have all possible histories.

p83 "We will see that, like a particle, the universe doesn't have just a single history, but every possible history, each with its own probability; and our observations of its current state affect its past and determine the different histories of the universe, just as the observations of the particles in the double-slit experiment affect the particles' past."