Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind

I've had this sitting on my shelves since shortly after it was published, in 2012, and with the recent (or recent-ish) news of Dr. Hawking's death, I figured it was time to finally get around to reading it.

This is a biography of Hawking, but the primary focus is on his work, and Ferguson manages a reasonably good layman's account of the science involved. She also gives us a good feel for Hawking as a human being: a brilliant but human guy with a great sense of humor and the ability to rise to some incredibly substantial challenges. So if you're interested in reading about Hawking's work and personality, it's definitely worth a look.

There are some things about it that bothered me a little, though. There are aspects of Hawking's personal show more life it declines to get into, which is something I respect, but in places -- such as the very brief mention of allegations in the early 2000s that Hawking was the victim of domestic abuse -- the writing sort of feels like it's shading from respectfully silent to annoyingly coy.

That's pretty minor, though. More irritating to me was Ferugson's recurring desire to talk about God and religion: Hawking's attitude towards these subjects, the extent to which his scientific formulations leave room for God and religious belief, etc. I suppose some of this is inevitable when you're talking about cosmology and the search for the origin of the universe, but as someone who doesn't believe religion has a place in science, I think she puts way too much emphasis on this subject. She's clearly trying very hard to be objective about it, but I nevertheless get the strong sense that she's projecting her own religious sensibilities onto things a bit too much, and I think she gets entirely too far into the philosophical weeds with it in the last chapter.

Rating: I sort of wanted to rate this one higher, because I don't have a problem recommending it, really, if you want to read about Hawking and his ideas. But the intrusion of the author's religious concerns irritates me just enough that I feel compelled to knock it down half a star. Obviously, that's not going to be an issue for everyone, but this is me rating it, so I'm giving it a 3.5/5. show less

Not a easy book to read. I thought that this would be more biographical whereas it consists of mainly quantum physic theory and the nature of the universe.