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Stephen Hawking

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A Brief History of Time Kindle Edition

by Stephen Hawking (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A landmark volume in science writing by one of the great minds of our time, Stephen Hawking’s book explores such profound questions as: How did the universe begin—and what made its start possible? Does time always flow forward? Is the universe unending—or are there boundaries? Are there other dimensions in space? What will happen when it all ends?

Told in language we all can understand, A Brief History of Time plunges into the exotic realms of black holes and quarks, of antimatter and “arrows of time,” of the big bang and a bigger God—where the possibilities are wondrous and unexpected. With exciting images and profound imagination, Stephen Hawking brings us closer to the ultimate secrets at the very heart of creation.

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Popular Highlights in this book

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Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light.
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An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!
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The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.
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From the Publisher

Wall Street Journal says, “A masterful summary of what physicists now think the world is made of”

The New Yorker says, “Charming and lucid… A book of sunny brilliance.”

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history, wrote the modern classic A Brief History of Time to help nonscientists understand the questions being asked by scientists today: Where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end, and if so, how? Hawking attempts to reveal these questions (and where we're looking for answers) using a minimum of technical jargon. Among the topics gracefully covered are gravity, black holes, the Big Bang, the nature of time, and physicists' search for a grand unifying theory. This is deep science; these concepts are so vast (or so tiny) as to cause vertigo while reading, and one can't help but marvel at Hawking's ability to synthesize this difficult subject for people not used to thinking about things like alternate dimensions. The journey is certainly worth taking, for, as Hawking says, the reward of understanding the universe may be a glimpse of "the mind of God." --Therese Littleton

Review

[Hawking] can explain the complexities of cosmological physics with an engaging combination of clarity and wit. . . . His is a brain of extraordinary power. --The New York Review of Books

This book marries a child's wonder to a genius's intellect. We journey into Hawking's universe while marvelling at his mind. --The Sunday Times, (London)

Masterful. --The Wall Street Journal

Charming and lucid . . . [A book of] sunny brilliance. --The New Yorker

Lively and provocative . . . Mr. Hawking clearly possesses a natural teacher's gifts -- easy, good-natured humor and an ability to illustrate highly complex propositions with analogies plucked from daily life. --The New York Times

Even as he sits helpless in his wheelchair, his mind seems to soar ever more brilliantly across the vastness of space and time to unlock the secrets of the universe. --Time --Reviews

About the Author

Michael Jackson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He is an award-winning poet, novelist, and anthropologist. Among his many books are Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project; Barawa, and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky; At Home in the World (published by Duke University Press); Pieces of Music, a novel; and Antipodes, a collection of poetry.

Professor Stephen Hawking, a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, is the pre-eminent theoretical physicist in the world. His book "A Brief History of Time" was a phenomenal worldwide bestseller. He has twelve honorary degrees and was awarded the CBE and was made a Companion of Honour. He has three children and one grandchild. Visit him at www.hawking.org.uk.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

OUR PICTURE OF
THE UNIVERSE

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun–or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell.

As long ago as 340 B.C. the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book On the Heavens, was able to put forward two good arguments for believing that the earth was a round sphere rather than a flat plate. First, he realized that eclipses of the moon were caused by the earth coming between the sun and the moon. The earth’s shadow on the moon was always round, which would be true only if the earth was spherical. If the earth had been a flat disk, the shadow would have elongated and elliptical, unless the eclipse always occurred at a time when the sun was directly under the center of the disk. Second, the Greeks knew from their travels that the North Star appeared lower in the sky when viewed in the south than it did in more northerly regions. (Since the North Star lies over the North Pole, it appears to be directly above an observer at the North Pole, but to someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon. From the difference in the apparent position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate that the distance around the earth was 400,000 stadia. It is not known exactly what length a stadium was, but it may have been about 200 yards, which would make Aristotle’s estimate about twice the currently accepted figure. The Greeks even had a third argument that the earth must be round, for why else does one first see the sails of a ship coming over the horizon, and only later see the hull?

Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in circular orbits about the earth. He believed this because he felt, for mystical reasons, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that circular motion was the most perfect. This idea was elaborated by Ptolemy in the second century A.D. into a complete cosmological model. The earth stood at the center, surrounded by eight spheres that carried the moon, the sun, the stars, and the five planets known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (Fig 1.1). The planets themselves moved on smaller circles attached to their respective spheres in order to account for their rather complicated observed paths in the sky. The outermost sphere carried the so-called fixed stars, which always stay in the same positions relative to each other but which rotate together across the sky. What lay beyond the last sphere was never made very clear, but it certainly was not part of mankind’s observable universe.

Ptolemy’s model provided a reasonably accurate system for predicting the positions of heavenly bodies in the sky. But in order to predict these positions correctly, Ptolemy had to make an assumption that the moon followed a path that sometimes brought it twice as close to the earth as at other times. And that meant that the moon ought sometimes to appear twice as big as at other times! Ptolemy recognized this flaw, but nevertheless his model was generally, although not universally, accepted. It was adopted by the Christian church as the picture of the universe that was in accordance with Scripture, for it had the great advantage that it left lots of room outside the sphere of fixed stars for heaven and hell.

A simpler model, however, was proposed in 1514 by a Polish priest, Nicholas Copernicus. (At first, perhaps for fear of being branded a heretic by his church, Copernicus circulated his model anonymously.) His idea was that the sun was stationary at the center and that the earth and the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun. Nearly a century passed before this idea was taken seriously. Then two astronomers–the German, Johannes Kepler, and the Italian, Galileo Galilei–started publicly to support the Copernican theory, despite the fact that the orbits it predicted did not quite match the ones observed. The death blow to the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic theory came in 1609. In that year, Galileo started observing the night sky with a telescope, which had just been invented. When he looked at the planet Jupiter, Galileo found that it was accompanied by several small satellites or moons that orbited around it. This implied that everything did not have to orbit directly around the earth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had thought. (It was, of course, still possible to believe that the earth was stationary at the center of the universe and that the moons of Jupiter moved on extremely complicated paths around the earth, giving the appearance that they orbited Jupiter. However, Copernicus’s theory was much simpler.) At the same time, Johannes Kepler had modified Copernicus’s theory, suggesting that the planets moved not in circles but in ellipses (an ellipse is an elongated circle). The predictions now finally matched the observations.

As far as Kepler was concerned, elliptical orbits were merely an ad hoc hypothesis, and a rather repugnant one at that, because ellipses were clearly less perfect than circles. Having discovered almost by accident that elliptical orbits fit the observations well, he could not reconcile them with his idea that the planets were made to orbit the sun by magnetic forces. An explanation was provided only much later, in 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most important single work ever published in the physical sciences. In it Newton not only put forward a theory of how bodies move in space and time, but he also developed the complicated mathematics needed to analyze those motions. In addition, Newton postulated a law of universal gravitation according to which each body in the universe was attracted toward every other body by a force that was stronger the more massive the bodies and the closer they were to each other. It was this same force that caused objects to fall to the ground. (The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat “in a contemplative mood” and “was occasioned by the fall of an apple.”) Newton went on to show that, according to his law, gravity causes the moon to move in an elliptical orbit around the earth and causes the earth and the planets to follow elliptical paths around the sun.

The Copernican model got rid of Ptolemy’s celestial spheres, and with them, the idea that the universe had a natural boundary. Since “fixed stars” did not appear to change their positions apart from a rotation across the sky caused by the earth spinning on its axis, it became natural to suppose that the fixed stars were objects like our sun but very much farther away.

Newton realized that, according to his theory of gravity, the stars should attract each other, so it seemed they could not remain essentially motionless. Would they not all fall together at some point? In a letter in 1691 to Richard Bentley, another leading thinker of his day, Newton argued that his would indeed happen if there were only a finite number of stars distributed over a finite region of space. But he reasoned that if, on the other hand, there were an infinite number of stars, distributed more or less uniformly over infinite space, this would not happen, because there would not be any central point for them to fall to.

This argument is an instance of the pitfalls that you can encounter in talking about infinity. In an infinite universe, every point can be regarded as the center, because every point has an infinite number of stars on each side of it. The correct approach, it was realized only much later, is to consider the finite situation, in which the stars all fall in on each other, and then to ask how things change if one adds more stars roughly uniformly distributed outside this region. According to Newton’s law, the extra stars would make no difference at all to the original ones on average, so the stars would fall in just as fast. We can add as many stars as we like, but they will still always collapse in on themselves. We now know it is impossible to have an infinite static model of the universe in which gravity is always attractive.

It is an interesting reflection on the general climate of thought before the twentieth century that no one had suggested that the universe was expanding or contracting. It was generally accepted that either the universe had existed forever in an unchanging state, or that it had been created at a finite time in the past more or less as we observe it today. In part this may have been due to people’s tendency to believe in eternal truths, as well as the comfort they found in the thought that even though they may grow old and die, the universe is eternal and unchanging.

Even those who realized that Newton’s theory of gravity showed that the universe could not be static did not think to suggest that it might be expanding. Instead, they attempted to modify the theory by making the gravitational force repulsive at very large distances. This did not significantly affect their predictions of the motions of the planets, but it allowed an infinite distribution of stars to remain in equilibrium–with the attractive forces between nearby stars balanced by the repulsive forces from those that were farther away. However, we now believe such an equilibrium would be unstable: if the stars in some region got only slightly nearer each other, the attractive forces between them would become stronger and dominate over the repulsive forces so that the stars would continue to fall toward each other. On the other hand, if the stars got a bit farther away from each other, the repulsive forces would dominate and drive them farther apart.

Another objection to an infinite static universe is normally ascribed to the German philosopher Heinrich Olbers, who wrote about this theory in 1823. In fact, various contemporaries of Newton had raised the problem, and the Olbers article was not even the first to contain plausible arguments against it. It was, however, the first to be widely noted. The difficulty is that in an infinite static universe nearly every line of sight would end on the surface of a star. Thus one would expect that the whole sky would be as bright as the sun, even at night. Olbers’s counterargument was that the light from distant stars would be dimmed by absorption by intervening matter. However, if that happened the intervening matter would eventually heat up until it glowed as brightly as the stars. The only way of avoiding the conclusion that the whole of the night sky should be as bright as the surface of the sun would be to assume that the stars had not been shining forever but had turned on at some finite time in the past. In that case the absorbing matter might not have heated up yet or the light from distant stars might not yet have reached us. And that brings us to the question of what could have caused the stars to have turned on in the first place.

The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed long before this. According to a number of early cosmologies and the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, and not very distant, time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have “First Cause” to explain the existence of the universe. (Within the universe, you always explained one event as being caused by some earlier event, but the existence of the universe itself could be explained in this way only if it had some beginning.) Another argument was put forward by St. Augustine in his book The City of God. He pointed out that civilization is progressing and we remember who performed this deed or developed that technique. Thus man, and so also perhaps the universe, could not have been around all that long. St. Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 B.C. for the Creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 B.C., which is when archaeologists tell us that civilization really began.)

Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world around it had existed, and would exist, forever. The ancients had already considered the argument about progress described above, and answered it by saying that there had been periodic floods or other disasters that repeatedly set the human race right back to the beginning of civilization.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004WY3D0O
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam; 10th edition (May 4, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 4, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 20603 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 242 pages

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Stephen Hawking

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Stephen Hawking's ability to make science understandable and compelling to a lay audience was established with the publication of his first book, A Brief History of Time, which has sold nearly 10 million copies in 40 languages. Hawking has authored or participated in the creation of numerous other popular science books, including The Universe in a Nutshell, A Briefer History of Time, On the Shoulders of Giants, The Illustrated On the Shoulders of Giants, and George's Secret Key to the Universe.

(Stephen William Hawking; Oxford, Reino Unido, 8 de Enero de 1942 - Cambridge, 14 de marzo de 2018) Físico teórico británico. A pesar de sus discapacidades físicas y de las progresivas limitaciones impuestas por la enfermedad degenerativa que padecía, Stephen William Hawking es probablemente el físico más conocido entre el gran público desde los tiempos de Einstein. Luchador y triunfador, a lo largo de toda su vida logró sortear la inmensidad de impedimentos que le planteó el mal de Lou Gehrig, una esclerosis lateral amiotrófica que le aquejaba desde que tenía 20 años. Hawking es, sin duda, un ejemplo particular de vitalidad y resistencia frente al infortunio del destino.

Fue miembro de la Real Sociedad de Londres, de la Academia Pontificia de las Ciencias y de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Estados Unidos. Fue titular de la Cátedra Lucasiana de Matemáticas (Lucasian Chair of Mathematics) de la Universidad de Cambridge desde 1979 hasta su jubilación en 2009. Entre las numerosas distinciones que le han sido concedidas, Hawking ha sido honrado con doce doctorados honoris causa y ha sido galardonado con la Orden del Imperio Británico (grado CBE) en 1982, el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de la Concordia en 1989, la Medalla Copley en 2006, la Medalla de la Libertad en 2009 y el Premio Fundación BBVA Fronteras del Conocimiento en 2015.

Alcanzó éxitos de ventas con sus trabajos divulgativos sobre Ciencia, en los que discute sobre sus propias teorías y la cosmología en general; estos incluyen A Brief History of Time, que estuvo en la lista de best-sellers del The Sunday Times británico durante 237 semanas.

La Editorial Alvi Books le dedicó, como tributo y reconocimiento, este espacio en Amazon en 2016.

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Customers find the book well-written, with enough brief explanations to explain the subject matter quite well. They appreciate the analogies and examples that help novice science buffs learn. Readers also mention the author has done a great job describing theories like general relativity. They say the insides are legible and the book itself is brilliant.

"...attempt to communicate complex science to the general public is written in a clear, almost elementary style, at least initially...." Read more

"Fantastic read in ever respect. Had to take my time and think page my page." Read more

"...More than that, the book contains interesting stories of some Nobel Prize winners in physics with their results related to the mentioned fundamental..." Read more

"...The book effortlessly walks you through theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, and the Big Bang Theory, among others...." Read more

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Customers find the book informative, interesting, and thought-provoking. They say it's a highly accessible treatise on modern astrophysics. Readers also appreciate the great rundown of philosophers and later scientists.

"...Thus far, it seems like the perfect scientific book to read – it’s light, clever, and even funny at times...." Read more

"...: 8.5/10 - A riveting journey through the cosmos that challenges, enlightens, and awakens the star-gazer in us all...." Read more

"...Very interesting chapters on worm holes, black holes, and time travel and the impossibility of a spaceship going faster than light speed...." Read more

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Customers find the book a good brief history for the layperson. They say the early chapters are interesting, showing how the early scientists figured out their early ideas. Readers also say the book is entertaining, structured, and timeless.

"...The end of the book is great with short bibliographies on the big 3 scientists Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei, and Issac Newton...." Read more

"...Hawking provides an entertaining and structured summary of the (then-current) understanding of the cosmos with a non-mathematical approach directed..." Read more

"...Author has done an excellent job for those chapters and I enjoyed reading them...." Read more

"...These are great reasons to reread this classic work, which has to be one of the finest in the history of science." Read more

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"...Not sure how to put all three thoughts together! The book is brief if compared to War and Peace!..." Read more

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Peter

Should you read this book? Heck yes.

Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2018

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Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is undoubtedly one of the classic casual scientific texts one should read to be well aware of the world around them and how it came to be. The author, an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, seamlessly places the reader in the shoes of a student while diving deep into the questions we have always wondered but have never had the craving to research on our own time. Beginning with the relative basics of discoveries in the past centuries, Stephen Hawking explains in great detail the logic and reasoning behind the evolution of the human understanding of the universe. After getting the base knowledge out of the way, the book quickly dives deeper and deeper into theoretical possibilities and the observations which back them up. Due to the vagueness of the topic, the author helps readers visualize and truly understand the concepts that are being discussed with similes and analogies which relate to the real, observable world and the everyday life of the audience. When talking about the steps that must be taken for a star to transition into a black hole, Stephen Hawking connects the complex series of reasoning to a simple image, helping the reader visualize the theory: “It is a bit like a balloon---there is a balance between the pressure of the air inside, which is trying to make the balloon expand, and the tension of the rubber, which is trying to make the balloon smaller” (85). As a reader, such a vivid comparison makes the discussion of “sufficient gravitational attraction” seem a whole lot simpler and manageable to wrap your head around. Moreover, the lighthearted remarks which are tossed in throughout the text keeps you entertained and encourages you to continue reading, maybe not for the theories Hawking talks about but rather for his clever jokes which connect the material which was just discussed. During his discussion of elementary particles (matter and antimatter), the author includes a lighthearted remark which more or less summarizes the material that was just discussed: “However, if you meet your antiself, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light” (71). The passage before this comment became complicated and very confusing to follow, however, after reading that joke, I couldn’t help myself but to turn a few pages back and reread his theory – all of this to understand his clever remark.
Thus far, it seems like the perfect scientific book to read – it’s light, clever, and even funny at times. Yet, some parts of the text became extremely complex and impossible to follow. It didn’t help that the author expected the audience to have prior knowledge of the historical events which connect with the theories being discussed: “In fact bursts of gamma rays from space have been detected by satellites originally constructed to look for violations of the Test Ban Treaty” (115). While knowing exactly what the treaty was about is not directly necessary for a comprehension of the ideas in the book, it would undoubtedly be more helpful if a quick snippet of historical information was included in the text. The complexity of the theory’s descriptions, on the other hand, have absolutely nothing to do with the book itself. Stephen Hawking included an abundance of analogies and explained the complicated concepts of wormholes in as simple of language as possible. The issue is not with the author and the writing style – the subject itself makes it challenging to follow the ideas on the paper. If the idea of having to reread the same paragraph multiple times upsets you – A Brief History of Time is definitely not the book for you.
All in all this is an outstanding scientific text, a classic even. The depth of the material that is being discussed in a syntax which an average teenager can understand is unbelievable at times. This book will answer the questions (and raise just as many new ones) you always had about anything to do with universe topics which are never discussed with the general public So, should you read this book? Heck yes.

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Will Fry

Well Worth The Read

Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2016

Verified Purchase

A Brief History Of Time explores some of the basic questions of existence, such as: How did the universe come to be? What's going to happen to it? How does time work? The book covers the size and age of the universe, the beginning and end of it, black holes, various theories about time, and how the theory of general relativity fits in with the quest for a general theory of everything.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest minds of our time, Hawking's attempt to communicate complex science to the general public is written in a clear, almost elementary style, at least initially. (As more difficult concepts are introduced, the sentences become thicker, and the paragraphs longer.)

For example, when introducing the “uncertainty principle”, Hawking writes:

“The more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa... Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world.”

What I Liked Least About It

By far the most infuriating thing about this book was Hawking’s deliberate and repeated use of a non-standard way to communicate numbers. For example:

“The idea of inflation could also explain why there is so much matter in the universe. There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe we can observe. Where did they all come from?”

Nobody writes (or understands) numbers this way. The most common way to communicate large numbers in science writing is with scientific notation, something that’s common enough that the average person at least knows what you mean. Hawking could have saved quite a bit of space in the above paragraph by simply writing “10^80” (sorry, this text field won't accept superscripts), which is how any other writer would have handled it. Did he expect that repeating “million” fourteen times would somehow impress someone?

(Also, oddly enough, “ten” followed by fourteen instances of “million” would actually be one with eight-five zeroes after it, not eighty. So, it was not only a poor way to write the number, but inaccurate as well. It should have had “one hundred” with thirteen instances of “million”.)

A second thing that began to bug me was the gratuitous use of the word “God”, in places where it didn’t seem to belong. Knowing as I do that Hawking admitted in 2014 that he doesn’t believe in God (“I’m an atheist”), and that he most likely didn’t believe in God in 1988 when he inserted these phrases about God, it seems disingenuous and misleading. As late as 2007, he was still saying “the laws [of science] may have been decreed by God”, though some who have known him since the 1970s say he has been an atheist the entire time.

It’s not just a few mentions. The idea of God permeates this book. To be clear, I’m not complaining that he talks about God; nearly everyone I have ever known does that repeatedly. My complaint is that the talk of God seems wedged into the pages, even in places where it isn’t appropriate, despite the writer’s atheism. Here are two examples, the first using God in an appropriate manner, and the second not so much:

“Newton was very worried by this lack of absolute position, or absolute space, as it was called, because it did not accord with his idea of an absolute God. In fact, he refused to accept lack of absolute space, even though it was implied by his laws.”

“However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”

Those are the final three sentences of the entire book. Later, in 2014, Hawking weakly tried to defend this phrasing: “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is we would know everything that God would know if there was a God, but there isn’t.” If that is what he meant, it is easy enough to say: “for then we would know what a god would know”. I can’t imagine anyone but a very small fringe of scientific-minded theists being pleased with his original wording.

What I Liked Most About It

Despite regular accusations from the anti-science crowd that “science is a religion” (example), I found no leaps of faith or baseless assertions in this book (or in any other science-related book I’ve read recently). Where something is unknown, the author said it’s unknown. If something is assumed, he said it is assumed, and explained why it’s assumed. Hawking even questions the very foundation of how science formulates theories. For example:

“It turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go. Instead, we break the problem up into bits and invent a number of partial theories. Each of these partial theories describes and predicts a certain limited class of observations, neglecting the effects of other quantities, or representing them by simple sets of numbers. It may be that this approach is completely wrong. If everything in the universe depends on everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation.”

This kind of language is exactly why I like science. It uses terms like “as far as we know”, “to the best of our knowledge”, “recent studies have shown”, “with a few exceptions, which I will mention below”, and so on. When contrasted with the firm language of religion (“absolute”, “always”, and “every”), it shows that science is a quest for knowledge rather than an assertion of it. Science tends to recognize what it doesn’t yet know; in fact, what isn’t known is the very reason for the existence of science.

Unlike the last book I reviewed, many of the ideas presented in this one did not make sense intuitively to me. Each of us grows up with an idea of the universe based on how it was first explained to us in our earliest days. It does not feel correct that the universe expanded out of an infinitely small point, or that it will someday contract back to that point — which is the most common scientific model of the universe. So when Hawking got to the point of explaining that it is possible, mathematically, for the universe to be finite without a singularity, I felt something like relief.

“It is possible for space-time to be finite in extent and yet to have no singularities that formed a boundary or edge. Space-time would be like the surface of the Earth, only with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn’t have a boundary or edge... so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary.”

In fact, each time I was starting to feel lost, Hawking would add something that grounded me just a little.

Additional Note

One thing that surprised me in several places were the dates of the discoveries, when compared to the dates I went to school and what I was (or was not) taught. For example, Hawkings says that the idea of electrons orbiting nuclei like planets orbiting a sun was an idea from the “beginning” of the 20th Century, and that it was overturned not too long after. Yet I was taught the old orbiting theory in the 1980s.

He also mentions that quarks were discovered in the 1960s, and much more work was done on them in the 1970s. My science books in high school in the 1980s didn’t mention them. The proton, neutron, and electron were said to be the smallest indivisible particles known.

It was frustrating to read these dates and realize that I was taught material that was known at the time to be incorrect. I thought quarks were discovered in the 1990s, because that’s when I first heard about them.

Hawking addresses this problem somewhat later in the book, when he talks about the increased pace of scientific discovery:

“In Newton’s time it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then, the pace of the development of science has made this impossible. Because theories are always being changed to account for new observations, they are never properly digested or simplified so that ordinary people can understand them. You have to be a specialist, and even then you can only hope to have a proper grasp of a small proportion of the scientific theories. Further, the rate of progress is so rapid that what one learns at school or university is always a bit out of date.”

Conclusion

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in science in general, or especially cosmology. I will probably read it again in a few years, to see if I feel any differently about it then.

34 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

A miracle

Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2024

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Fantastic read in ever respect. Had to take my time and think page my page.

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Amazon Customer

Far more accessible than I imagined

Reviewed in Canada on April 2, 2024

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I had not read this when it was published in 1988, and assumed it was a coffee-table book that everyone bought but no-one actually read.
Instead I found it well-written, explaining concepts in modern cosmology well to a lay readership - or at least to one with a basic grasp of science.
This edition was updated in 2017 to include recent discoveries.

Ancelmo Castro

Obra prima!!! Linguagem simples e clara, além de ser muito bem ilustrado.

Reviewed in Brazil on February 23, 2023

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A arte gráfica é muito bonita! Uma obra prima obrigatória em qualquer residência do planeta...

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Akhil Mohan

Exhilarating and challenging

Reviewed in India on August 2, 2024

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Don’t kid yourselves, there’s a lot in this book that’s difficult to understand. Sometimes, you have to read through entire paragraphs knowing full well that you have no clue about what you’re reading, and just hoping that somewhere towards the end it will make sense… mostly that’s what happens.

From the origins of the universe to the idea of time travel and the direction of time; from multiverses and wormholes to the very edge of the science vs theology debate, this book is one of the most intellectually exhilarating (and challenging) ones you can hope to read.

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Eduardo A Ceballos

Facil de leer

Reviewed in Spain on April 12, 2024

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Toca temas muy interesantes y es facil de leer.
Se nota que es apacionado por lo que escribe

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Lisa

Unfassbar interessant

Reviewed in Germany on March 13, 2024