Hawking plans book on universe

Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist who wrote the bestselling “A Brief History of Time,” is planning a new book for Bantam Dell Publishing that will examine how and why the universe was created.

“The Grand Design,” which is expected to be released in the fall of 2008, will be co-written by Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist and author who collaborated with Hawking on “A Briefer History of Time,” which was published last year.