A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes

As a fairly frequent reader of popular science, I've heard some of the stuff in A Brief History of Time described better elsewhere (particularly string theory), but how could you not want to spend some time in the company of one of the finest intellects of our time? Hawking was (and still is) a pioneer of some of the discoveries unpacked here, and he brings us into his thought process and how he came to make these deductions. This makes it different from many other popular science books, but it is also thrilling in itself.

Some of the deductions made in astronomy are awe-inspiring – just think how impressive an intellect an ancient Greek or Renaissance man must be to overcome the myths of his time and understand the complexities of show more planetary orbits, just from looking through a telescope and doing some maths, let alone a modern astrophysicist conceptualizing black holes, spacetime and string theory. It makes you proud of mankind (even if your brain throbs trying to understand it) that 'we' are discovering this stuff (to this very day, with things like the Higgs boson and gravitational waves). It is exploration not physical, but with pure thought. If you want to map a coastline, you sail along it. If you discover an island, you have to stumble across it. But space doesn't allow that physical contact. This is something else – something even more impressive. It is a fine testament to the logical capabilities of the human mind. show less

Recently I gave up on Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose, who worked closely with Stephen Hawking, because of the density and opacity of the text. This book doesn’t have that problem; it steps back every few pages to give some analogy or illustration of its implications. I also enjoy Hawking’s sense of humor, which maintains the strangeness of contemplating the origins of the universe from a comfortable couch. Most of the ideas are not new; he is restating the current picture of the universe according to quantum physics. The book therefore becomes a helpful primer on the discoveries of the twentieth century and how scientists are still trying to make sense of them.

A Brief History of Time condensed: It begins (maybe), it exists and goes on and it ends (maybe).

You can understand the tragedy and reason for A Brief History of Time’s existence from the last page of Hawking’s conclusion; that the sum of man’s knowledge is too great for anyone to comprehend. Amidst the bemoaning of Wittgenstein’s reduction of philosophy to linguistic legerdemain there’s a realisation that the limits of the human mind mean an actual grand unified theory is near impossible as no-one can reach the required level of understanding. None of us are God. We are limited by the amount of information we can partake of and our own mortality. So the best we can hope for is an infinite number of theories which explain show more aspects of the universe and, hopefully, eventually link them up via chance and hard work.

Hawking’s book is a remarkable work – it attempts to explain the cutting edge theories of black holes and quantum mechanics to a wide audience. And as garnish, at the end, he explains how modern science functions. In this it’s fairly successful – although he’s not a great prose stylist it’s functional and clear about the concepts he’s talking about. The presence of jokes is a boon amidst the heavy science, lightening the book and making it less frightening. It’s also enlightening to see scientists of the calibre of Hawking and Einstein being unafraid to admit error – this is likely what separates them from the (relative) journeymen who stick to theory in the face of evidence. This doesn’t mean that the book is an easy read; by its nature it can’t be. But it’s as close as you can get to having such a complex branch of science laid out in an understandable way. I’m not convinced about the metaphysics, but it’s fascinating to see the possibility of a god taken into scientific account and neither accepted nor dismissed. A fascinating work then, but one that I’m sure I’m going to need multiple re-reads to fully understand. show less

Hawking makes the universe feel both vast and (somewhat) comprehensible. A classic introduction to cosmology that blends clear explanations with awe-inspiring ideas—though your brain may feel a little singed by the end

Glad I finally picked this up off the "to-read" shelf. There are a bunch more amusing asides than I expected, which were a nice surprise. I'm not sure Hawking gets the pitch right throughout the book (sometimes the level of technical detail is very low, sometimes it's very high) but overall it's a very interesting book.

Beautifully written, in the sense that I, a mere layperson, could understood a whole book on theoretical physics with minimum eye-glaze or supervision.

I would have loved this book being taught in a non-specialized school course, because this is the kind of stuff that feels really powerful and enlightening to know and yet doesn't mire you non-layperson rigour. It probably increases my literacy in levels beyond loose concepts used in television/movies for plot justification.

I am being mean-spirited by taking off one star for the sole purpose of indicating that this book did not fill me with a great subjective joy; in other ways, given my limited education on the matter, it seemed flawless from my frame of reference. Some of the book's show more 'banter' felt forced or dated. I am thankful the book went out of its way not to go into an anti-god diatribe and be gently charitable on the matter, and I assume the choice to address the possibility of the universe being god's creation was a purposeful one and an aim of the book (but the need for the aim wasn't apparent to me, even if I respect how it was done.) show less

This is the Folio edition of the 2008 revision of Stephen Hawking's account of theoretical physics and cosmology, describing his contributions to the concept of black holes, especially the mathematical description of Hawking radiation. The writing is clear, and more autobiographical and chatty than I expected. I still struggled to understand and picture the paradoxes of time and space at the edge of black holes, since that is where the general theory of relativity meets quantum mechanics. Virtual particles emerge spontaneously from the vacuum because of quantum fluctuations. Matter particles with a "spin" (rotational symmetry of ½ usually appear as particle and antiparticle, and quickly annihilate each other, but if one is trapped in show more the black hole, the other may be radiated. It was interesting that Hawking spent a good amount of prose on what the physics of the big bang has to say about God. Perhaps his unusually prolonged ALS disability had concentrated his mind on the divine. show less