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Loading... A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holesby Stephen W. Hawking (otherwise under Stephen Hawking)
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I would say one would really need to be a mathematician with a major grounding in theoretical physics or at least have a lot more spare time than I do to fully appreciate what this work contains. That may suggest the author lacked the ability to explain his subject but I think it has more to do with the extraordinary difficulty of the subject so I admired his attempt to explain it to people like me (with little physics in my background) and suggest he probably did the best job possible. (  )1   Martin44 | Dec 10, 2009 |  Huh? (  ) jwcooper3 | Nov 15, 2009 | I finally finished this book. It's engaging, witty, and of course fascinating, but all the same I had to read it in spurts. Most of it was not new information, but it helped solidify a lot of concepts in my head through analogies plucked from real life. I'm still a tad shaky on string theory, but I do have a better understanding of black holes than I did before. This is what a layman's science book should be like: no equations or jargon, lots of pictures, and a very friendly narrative tone. ( )1 melydia | Oct 28, 2009 | For the most part I was following along, up to chapter seven or so. Then I encountered portions where my eyes glazed over and I had to skim the details, just trying to grasp the big picture. While the presentation is very good (especially in the illustrated edition), there's a lot here to retain. The humour was welcome, and I can always appreciate a good metaphor. The Einstein biography I read last autumn provided a stepping stool, and this book in turn provides good background for understanding certain science-fiction novels more clearly (e.g. Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War", Dan Simmons' "Ilium", etc.). I'm sorry that I'll most likely never have the pleasure of attending a Stephen Hawking lecture, I'm sure it would be fascinating. ( )2 Cecrow | Aug 31, 2009 | Well-written enough that 95% was still comprehensible while listening to the audio version. ( ) szarka | Jul 24, 2009 | 
 Through his cerebral journeys, Mr. Hawking is bravely taking some of the first, though tentative, steps toward quantizing the early universe, and he offers us a provocative glimpse of the work in progress.
References to this work on external resources.
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400)
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