larry: stephen hawking on why we exist next on larry king live. good evening. very special program tonight. stephen hawking is a theoretical physicist. he was the professor of mathematics at the universe of cambridge for 30 years. he s the 2009 recipient of the presidential medal of freedom and co-author of a brilliant and controversial new book the grand design. we welcome him back to larry king live. we have a serious of questions planned. let s get right to it. stephen, why is it important to find the grand design of our universe? i believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it.
if nothing is outside of space time, it is actually not in space time. space time are an activity of that nothingness. behavior of that nothingness. as are all laws of nature, but the laws of nature are not inscribed somewhere in a book. they exist in the consciousness of mathematicians. no equation will ever make the universe work. the equations merely describe the behavior of the universe. so you know, when i think of mathematics i think of it actually as the language of god, and when i think of physicists, like leonard and stephen hawking, i think that s god explaining god to god using mathematics basically. and you know, stephen really acknowledged i think leonard will acknowledge, too, that there s a theory in mathematics called gordon s theorem which
comes out this month. father robert j. spitzer, president of the center of faith and reason and spitzer center for ethical leadership. he s the author of new proofs for the existence of god: contributions of contemporary physics and philosophy. the catholic church. i once had a catholic priest tell me once that he was a jesuit, he spent that day with catholics and remembered what a catholic was. anyway, we ll start with leonard. how did you come to be co-author? how did this come together, you and stephen writing the book? it started around 2002. i had written my first book which was about the concept of curve space and how it came about and how we use it in physics. one day my agent called me and said, hey, guess what, how would you like to write a book with stephen hawking? i thought about it for, maybe a
fundamental level of the universe. and nothing in the book, nothing in the book invalidates any of these three ideas, transcendence, interconnectedness and our desire and our ability to embrace joy, loving, kindness, peace of mind, equinimity, math mat iccal truth. where do these thing come from? they exist at the fundamental level of space time geometriry. just like super positions of possibility contain spin and charge and gravity and time as possibility, so, too, does mathematical truth and platonic values. that s what sir roger pendrose, an often-time colleague ofstein hawking said.
made especially in logical determinism. larry: leonard, are you going to do a book with deepak? we re talking about that. yeah. larry: and the theme would be what? well, it would probably be something related to what we re talking about today. his point of view, i have my point of view. we thought discussion of that could be of interest to people. larry: let s assume, it s a fair assumption, the three of you are being interviewed by an idiot. can we assume there are three idiots sitting around the table trying to understand the universe? larry: i don t know. effective means of asking questions. i don t know. the first simple question, let s start with you, leonard. who created the nothing? how can something come out of nothing? where did the nothing come from? does there have to be a something a beginning? so around the turn of the 20th century, physicists started