A new book by Stephen Hawking, "The Grand design", is out (co-authored by L. Mlodinov). Whether it is going to achieve the status of the "Brief history of time" of course remains to be seen. Judging from the general media interest it seems to be rather likely. Every major (English-speaking) media outlet hurries up to add its three pennies on the matter. Most of the reviews revolve around "the God question". The New York Times review title - "Many Kinds of Universes, and None Require God" - seems to summarize those well. A notable exception is the review by yet another great of the XX century physics, Roger Penrose.
This has appeared in the Financial Times and focused, or at least arrived at at the end, on a subjective versus objective problem in quantum mechanics. Clearly, not the most burning problem in an every day practice of a data analyst, but a classic one, and I reckon, one of those which while not keeping us - practitioners - up late at night, remain buried at the back of every scientist mind ("and just waiting to rise its head again ..." - of course ;-)).
The review is worth reading (in a sense of a late weekend-afternoon reading) at least as a piece of scientific historiography or yet another chapter of a struggle of two eminent foes.
As for the book ... well, we probably will need to read it ourselves to find out. On the general grounds I do remember that my (rather vague) familiarity with "Brief history of time" turned out to be a decisive factor in convincing Her Majesty Immigration Officer at the Heathrow Airport to let me in the UK on my arrival there as a first-time postdoc in mid-1990... The pros of reading popular science books are clearly unfathomable ...
And the conclusion to draw from the review ?! I guess "better not to talk too much over a dinner, as it can bite you back 40 years on" is the one which offers itself most readily ...
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