The Universe in a Nutshell Author: Visit Amazon's Stephen Hawking Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0965326942 | Format: EPUB
The Universe in a Nutshell Description
- Paperback: 216 pages
- Publisher: Bantam; 1St Edition edition (2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0965326942
- ISBN-13: 978-0965326940
- Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.5 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
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.
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.
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