Customer Reviews

The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's Contributions to Physics

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This book collects a series of lectures given at a conference celebrating Stephan Hawking's sixtieth birthday. If you don't know who Stephen Hawking is then this book is definitely not for you! His contributions are too extensive to give a comprehensive list here, a very short list of highlights would include seminal contributions to singularity theorems, quantum cosmology, co-authoring one of the great books in general relativity and his discovery that black holes emit (approximately?) thermal radiation. The lectures collected in this book provide a more complete overview of the many areas in which he has contributed. Given Hawking's accomplishments it's not surprising that the books contributors include many of the world's most prominent physicists.

There are forty-four chapters covering a vast range of topics in theoretical physics. The level of the material also has a wide range, from introductory to very advanced discussions. I thought the selection of papers was great.

The first part of the book is at a very introductory level. That isn't to say the material isn't quite interesting. The topics include basic general relativity, gravity waves, cosmology and singularities. This part should be accessible to a general audience.

The remainder of the book is more advanced, some of it quite advanced. Nevertheless I would expect much of it to be accessible to advanced undergraduates. Some of the material is fairly standard such as cosmology (standard general relativity treatment), inflation and black holes (standard general relativity version). However, most of the topics presented involve less well understood physics.

It's difficult to describe the breadth of the content without just looking a table of contents, but I'll try to give a rough idea of it. Not surprisingly there are many talks on physics of black holes that isn't completely understood. A partial list of black hole topics includes: primordial black holes, inner-horizon stability (a tentative answer is given), string effects and information loss. Here is a very coarse grained list of the rest of the content: loop quantum gravity, chronology protection conjecture, topology change, the holographic principle (or conjecture, depending on who you ask), Euclidean quantum gravity, topology change, string theory (touched on in many talks), quantum cosmology (basic, with supersymmetry and implication for the problem of time), cosmology (a wide variety) and more.

In summary, many interesting ideas in theoretical physics are discussed. They naturally center on general relativity, quantum gravity and cosmology. Even the difficult topics are fairly accessible. I would expect most graduate students would enjoy it, as would many advanced undergraduates with a solid background in general relativity and quantum mechanics (however, a lot of the material is quite challenging). Some of the material would also be interesting to astronomy and astrophysics students too.

This book of insightful and sometimes very witty presentations to honor this very courageous icon of science and mathematical physicist is MUST reading for all Physicists and Applied Mathematicians who want to get a glimse of the great minds of the past 40 years. I enjoyed every page. You do not need a PhD to comprehend this book, just a solid scientific and mathematical foundation. Good reading, fellow scientists and mathematicians! Prof Dan Remy (ret)

I was going to write a longer review, but it would look like I just cut 'n pasted from Dean Welch's excellent entry.

Suffice it to say that if you're considering buying this book then you probably should, because it starts easy and then gets more interesting.

You won't know whether you feel relieved or scared that there are things CRITICAL to understanding what reality actually is, but which you never even heard of. It will give you insight about the Big Picture, rather than seeing physics and cosmology as fascinating images on pieces of a jigsaw puzzle you're making slow progress on.

But be warned! This book is like approaching c. As it gets more and more interesting, you slow down and read fewer pages in the same time. Sooner or (hopefully) later, you feel like you're slogging through knee-high snow towards a warm house which is so close to that you can see people inside laughing and drinking at a sex party. But you need to know that your goal is in fact infinitely far away; if you read enough of this book, the time it takes to get to the next page reaches infinity, and you can only marvel in wonder about the beautiful things forever inaccessible to you, but which you know lie on the other side of the door you can't quite reach.

For the record, time stopped for me during the chapter about anti-DeSitter spaces.

==[ If you're "Feynman/Einstein smart", it's on your level and gives a good picture of the current state of research and where we're heading.

==[ If you're "astrophysicist smart", it'll give very convincing answers to questions you didn't realize they had made such progress toward solving.

==[ If you're "Faye Kane smart", you'll skip through much of the beginning, then read concise, very well-written explanations of things you already know. After that, you'll learn things you've wanted to know but never figured you would.

==[ If you're "high school science club smart", you'll find this book extremely interesting and you'll go "Oh, wow, COOL!" when you read it sitting alone in the corner of the cafeteria where the normal kids can't throw food at you to make the cheerleaders laugh.

BTW, a far better idea is to put the damm book down and ask that sharp girl who you guiltily look at in math class who's in the other corner of the cafeteria if you can sit across from her since you're both eating alone reading graduate-level physics. She's ME. Tiny url dot com slash realsmartsux.

==[ But if you're a typical American, go back to your tee-vee set and laugh real hard at a chimpanzee dressed in human clothes hit people with a plastic baseball bat. He's YOU.

Oh, and please stop voting republican.

An age-old tradition in the scientific community is to celebrate the career of an eminent scientist upon reaching his or her 60th birthday. This particular volume was written to celebrate Steven Hawking's 60th birthday, which not only because of his prolific scientific work, but also his physical condition is all the more reason to celebrate his life and achievements, during which, physics has grown to encompass the entire spectrum of matter - bridging particle physics with cosmology.

The book is divided into 9 sections, with topics ranging from Desitter Space, M-Space, Hawking Radiation, Black Holes, Spacetime, Singularities, Quantum Gravity, Cosmology, as well as an overview of Hawking's career. As one would expect, the sections are high-quality writings, providing not only a celebration of Hawking's lifework, but also a time capsule for future researchers of the history of the state of the art in physics at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Contributors include Hawkings' one-time research partner Roger Penrose, as well as other luminaries of the physics research community, including Martin Rees, Kip Thorne, Werner Israel, Leonard Susskind, James Hartle, Alan Guth, and others. In addition to the discussions of physics theory, there are more personal references made by the likes of Stanford's Leonard Susskind in which he recounts debating with Hawking on information loss in black holes; with the University of Oxford's Roger
Penrose on the theory of black hole entropy; and with Caltech's Kip Thorne on cosmic censorship (the existance of naked singularities) and the possibility of time travel.

Incidentally, Hawking and Susskind have been named Distinguished Research Chairs of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, at which the likes of Lee Smolin and Gerard t'Hooft are also members.