Lucy, a first-year physics undergraduate, joins forces with David, a final-year postgraduate student in theoretical physics, to crack the ultimate problem – why do laws exist that allowed the creation of our universe and even the whole multiverse? David is an atheist; Lucy believes in God.

They begin by inverting the most famous theorem in modern mathematics: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. This leads them through extraordinary new concepts to a mind-bending conclusion. On the journey, they confront their own beliefs, but the gap between them may be too great for them to admit their growing attraction for each other...

About the book

The book started life as a mathematical explanation of a new hypothesis: the origin of natural law. The work offered at least a glimpse of the character, if not a full resolution, of the answer to the seemingly infinite series of questions – yes, but what caused that? – raised by any traditional attempt to account for the creation of the universe and the multiverse. Early in the writing, it became clear that, to be accessible to a wide audience, the core of the book – the denouement – would have to be prefaced with substantial tracts of cosmology, mathematics, philosophy and modern physics, which threatened to engulf the essence of the work.

So, instead, the format of the book was changed initially to that of a Socratic dialogue between two physicists, launching straight into the thesis to be tested, and quite soon evolving into what turned out to be a much more reader-friendly story of two students, one an undergraduate and one a PhD research student in theoretical physics. At some point in this metamorphosis, the book developed a life of its own, the characters becoming individuals, speaking and thinking for themselves, while remaining true to the central mission of discovering the origin of natural law.
It may at first seem odd that a book that started out as a mathematically based text should stray into the fields of self-awareness, metaphysics and religion, concepts more usually considered in – how to put it? – “New Age” literature. However, it is hoped that the necessity and, indeed, the inevitability of extending the arena to include such territory will become clear a short way into the book.

Some of the background to the ideas discussed in the book is to be found in other pages on this website. The final climb to the summit, the central discovery of the book, however, deserves to be approached in context, not exposed bare, orphaned, in these brief website pages, but by reading the book for the fundamental, foothill concepts upon which the ascent can steadily build to progressively vertiginous ideas, culminating in the dizzy peak of the God Equation itself. (If this sounds like a blatant wheeze to promote sales of the book, rest assured that there would be no point – almost all of the visitors to this site will already own the book, since the website is only advertised in the book itself.) I hope that you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.