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233 of 241 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully Simple Brilliance!, November 7, 2001
The Universe in a Nutshell is the best popular science book I have ever read. Professor Stephen Hawking deserves many more than five stars for this book! If you have any interest in understanding the latest attempts to create a unified scientific Theory of Everything in the universe, this is the book for you. Professor Hawking has combined many perspectives to show how Einstein's special and general theories of relativity have been updated to explain the big bang, black holes, and an expanding universe; superstring theory; p-branes; how many dimensions the universe has; whether the future can be predicted in a deterministic way; whether time travel is possible; how science will transform our biological and thinking futures in the context of Star Trek technology; and M-theory to consider whether "we live on a brane or are we just holograms?" Although any of these subjects can be found in popular science books, few such books discuss all of them simply and intelligently in terms of each other from the theoretical perspective and experimental evidence. Those who wonder what science has to say about religious ideas will find this book valuable, for Professor Hawking is unafraid to address questions about whether there can be a beginning to the universe in a scientific sense. What could or could not have preceded the big bang? Fans of A Brief History of Time (1988) will find that Professor Hawking has made two changes to make this book more accessible to the nonphysicist. First, he as written the book so that you can follow the argument solely through the many beautiful and helpful illustrations and their captions. The method parallels the one he used successfully in the 1996 book, The Illustrated Brief History of Time. Second, only the first two chapters are required reading to understand the rest of the book. You can read chapters 3-7 in any order after the first two, which means that you can get into the material that will be of most interest to you much sooner! Professor Hawking's sense of humor also lightens the subject a lot. The book has witticisms, puns, and visual jokes galore to make you chuckle, from funny Shakespearean quotes ("I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space." Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2), to images from his appearance in the Star Trek: Next Generation television show (where he won at poker with Einstein . . . and had a mysterious visitor sit on his lap), to tales of bets lost and won, to unexpected comments about the effect of airline food on your life expectancy. To make the material less dense, he also includes biographical information about the quirks of the physicists who have made these marvelous discoveries. If you are fairly knowledgeable about physics, you will find this a fairly quick read . . . but one that will stimulate new flights of thought that can keep you busy for years. For example, he describes the physical limits of population growth and electricity being reached on earth by 2600. Then he goes on to speculate about how knowledge expansion through books can carry us forward faster to solutions than our geometric physical expansion. The future may well include major changes in the physical qualities of what a human is, a better connection between our brains and our electronic extensions, and the need to solve a delicate problem of where we should design for speed . . . and where for handling more complexity. My favorite chapter was the one on predicting the future. My next favorite one related to the relevance of Star Trek to our future. I found the chapter on the Universe in a Nutshell to be the most fascinating as Professor Hawking explains the case for multiple histories occurring based on Richard Feynman's work. Ultimately, one of the beauties of this book is the marvelous human spirit behind it. Professor Hawking seems like Leonardo to me, bought forward to today to challenge us to be our best as people and as thinkers. I feel honored to sit and learn at his feet. I recommend that you reread this book once a year, because your thinking will be stimulated again and again by this outstanding overview of how all of our theories of reality may fit together. One of the lessons of this book is that much of what we think of as "fact" is merely a convenient approximation of a more complex circumstance. Newton's thinking about gravity is a good example. Where in your life do you need to know with as much precision as possible, and where will approximations work just fine? Making that choice well can be the most important talent you can develop. See beyond your limited perspective to the pulsing reality around us!
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258 of 274 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Genius Explains It All, November 24, 2001
A number of years ago Stephen Hawking wrote a book that became, it is said, one of the bestselling, unread books of all time--A Brief History of Time. Now, I, being a physicist and teacher myself, actually read the book when it came out and enjoyed it immensely, though I admit it has its flaws. His new book has many of the same strengths and flaws. There is no doubt that Hawking loves his work and it is always fun to read someone who gets that love across in their writing. He covers a number of inherently fascinating topics--the birth of the universe, black holes, time travel, etc.--and offers reasonable explanations of these phenomena. This book also has the advantage of being beautifully made and offering much more in the way of illustrations than A Brief History of Time does to help visualize the difficult concepts he is describing. It is in some ways a coffee table book of cutting edge physics. On the other hand, the concepts described are difficult and no number of illustrations is going to change that. Hawking himself says he tried to write a simpler book this time but he only partially succeeds. Most of the world has a difficult time grasping Einstein's four dimensional spacetime let alone higher dimensional spaces, flexible time and branes. Additionally, though Hawking always gives credit where credit is due, he's not above tooting his own horn and a current of arrogance runs through his text. The explanations he offers are his own and he often seems close-minded to other ideas. Not that I'm against this, per se. As I tell my students, confidence in the fact that you can get the right answer is a main ingredient of genius. It keeps someone like Hawking working through his unique ideas to their conclusion. Without that confidence, no new and world-changing thoughts would find their way to us. Still, it can be off-putting and some readers might not realize there are other theories out there. Ultimately, however, this is a book worth reading. Particularly if you like science and you can open your mind to multi-dimensional spaces. Hawking's ideas fire the mind and get you wondering about what the universe is really like whether or not you understand him or believe him.
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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good starting point for the uninitiated layman., April 22, 2002
People who try to write books about physics or other (to the layman, anyway) arcane topics have a problem: How do you make complex topics best described mathematically accessible to the math adverse layman? Hawking tackles that challenge in The Universe in a Nutshell. Through simplified text, lots of nifty illustrations, and a prose style that focuses on a short, quick hitting, modular sort of presentation style, Hawking attempts to render the complex and often obscure notions of cosmology and physics simply enough for the interested but uninitiated reader to comprehend. On the whole, he succeeds rather well. There are the inevitable sections where the translation from math to verbiage fails to make the transition well, but for the most part the accompanying illustrations will get the reader through to an understanding of the primary point, if not the fine points, of the discussion. A lot has been written in prior reviews comparing this to A Brief History of Time. The comparison is fatuous. These books are aimed at different markets-the prior at the more sophisticated and initiated reader, this at the less sophisticated, less initiated reader. They aren't comparable works-one is intended to be simpler, more basic, than the other. That it is does not render it a "inferior" work. Personally, I think Hawking deserves credit for genuinely trying to provide all level of interested reader an access point to these ideas and concepts. If you are a more enlightened sort about these topics, skip this book-you probably won't learn anything new. If you think "string theory" explains why those tin-can-with-string "phones" we played with as kids work, then this is probably the book for you!
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