STEPHEN HAWKING certainly believes in the power of God when it comes to promoting his new book (see 鈥淪tephen Hawking says there鈥檚 no theory of everything鈥�).
According to the world鈥檚 most famous living scientist, a deity is not needed to explain the creation of the universe. All you need to light the blue touch paper is M-theory, a theoretical framework first put forward in 1995 by Ed Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In other words, the universe ignited itself. This unsurprising revelation, to physicists at least, still managed to generate headlines around the globe.
M-theory is certainly worth regarding with awe. Its potential to be a theory of everything is what drives so many scientists to study it. Yet it is still a work in progress. The theory is running ahead of experiment, and even with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, it seems highly unlikely that this mathematically beautiful theory can be put to any kind of meaningful test for decades, if not generations.
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Until there is empirical evidence for M-theory, Hawking鈥檚 suggestion that it has all the answers is just a matter of faith.