The Wire has come to expect grand pronouncements from the esteemed physicist Stephen Hawking, who previously urged humanity to spread into space to ensure the species will survive, yet cautioned against trying to contact aliens while doing so. So it comes as less of a surprise that he asserts in his latest book, The Grand Design, that it's "not necessary to invoke God" to set the universe in motion. The universe, Hawking argues, is simply an "inevitable consequence of the laws of physics" (as reported in BBC News) and his latest book seeks to contest the notion that the origin of the universe must have been initiated by a creator. Spontaneous generation, it appears, reigns supreme in his latest title. Alan Boyle at MSNBC breaks down his theory:

What he's actually saying in the book is that when we study the universe's origins, we have to work our way back from the present, rather than assuming there's an arbitrary point 13.7 billion years ago when Someone pressed the button on a cosmic stopwatch. And when you look at it that way, the universe looks more and more like a quantum phenomenon, in which a multitude of histories diverge.

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Erik Hayden