‘The Grand Design,’ by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

From The Washington Post:

Stephen-Hawking-006 In “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams famously had his characters ask a computer to provide the ultimate answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything.” As Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow point out in their book “The Grand Design,” the computer's response — 42 — was less than helpful. Hawking, who needs no introduction, and Mlodinow, a Caltech physicist with a string of excellent books to his credit, have taken on that ultimate question in a somewhat more rigorous form by asking three related ones:

Why is there something instead of nothing?

Why do we exist?

Why does this particular set of laws govern our universe and not some other set?

More here.