Product Description
A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, was a landmark volume in science writing and in world-wide acclaim and popularity, with more than 9 million copies in print globally. The original edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the ensuing years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro—and the macrocosmic world—observations that have confirmed many of Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book.
Now a decade later, this edition updates the chapters throughout to document those advances, and also includes an entirely new chapter on Wormholes and Time Travel and a new introduction. It make vividly clear why A Brief History of Time has transformed our view of the universe.
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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
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 A bit too brief ( bleach003 )
I felt like there wasn't enough information in Hawking's explanations to really understand the concepts. So many times the fragments of information provided left me with a vague idea and a lot of questions.
For instance, Hawking writes "a matter particle, such as an electron or a quark, emits a force-carrying particle. The recoil from this emission changes the velocity of the matter particle. The force-carrying particle then collides with another matter particle and is absorbed. This collision changes the velocity of the second particle, just as if there had been a force between the two matter particles." I thought this was fascinating, and I can understand how that would cause a repulsive force in terms of classical Newtonian physics as long as the force-carrying particle has mass. But he goes on to say that some force-carrying particles "have no mass of their own". So I'm left with several questions:
1. How do force-carrying particles with no mass transmit a force? How can the ejection of a massless particle cause a recoil?
2. How do force-carrying particles generate attractive forces?
3. Does an electron in isolation, for instance, continually fire out force-carrying particles in all directions all the time to generate its electric field? Does it just have an infinite number of force particles to eject? If not, how does it "know" to emit force-carrying particles towards another electron when it comes near so as to repel it? It's no good to postulate that the other electrons' electric field compels the electron to eject a force-carrying particle because the exchange of particles is supposed to constitute the electric field.
At every turn, I'm left with these vague concepts and unanswered questions. I took three university physics courses and touched on relativity and briefly on quantum mechanics. In school, often one starts by learning equations and only later does a qualitative understanding really develop. I had hoped to better learn that second half of the puzzle by reading some qualitative descriptions with perhaps some analogies or illustrative anthropomorphisms about what an electron "wants" to do. In Hawking's defense, perhaps the difficulty in giving an intuitive description is inherent to the material which is counterintuitive by its nature.
Also, there were a lot of pronouncements of "X is true" without any explanation of how we know it's true. What experimental results attest to the truth of this proposition? Perhaps such explanations are beyond the scope of this book but they would have been interesting I think.
These difficulties aside, I did learn some interesting concepts and I still felt like the book was a worthwhile read.
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Good, but hard
Well, it's very nice for those who want to understand the universe better, but it's VERY hard at the first time you read it. I decided to read it all at once, not understanding a lot of it, and going back again to try to get the idea.
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 unintelligible ( jp_harwinder )
History will look back at this best selling book and here is what it should say: This book is very lucid to those who have not read it, but it is quite unintelligible to those who have. Buy this book, it doesn't cost that much, to see how a supposedly great scientist cannot put together a coherent thought on paper. It you want to read clear scientific writing, read Lev Landau and then compare to this tripe by Hawking.
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 Informative, fascinating, highly readable ( farhan_ghazali )
A fascinating, non-technical explanation of the modern concepts of theoretical physics. Full of wonder and surprise...makes us look at the world and universe with a fresh pair of eyes. A modern classic.
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Brilliant ( sgtkerrye )
One review stated " It Will Change the Way You Look at the Universe!" I have found this to be true and at a young age, it definitely sparked my interest in conceptual physics. I own this book in hardback and have found that the illustrations go a long way in explaining the content. A Brief History of Time explains a range of subjects in cosmology, including the Big Bang, black holes, light cones and superstring theory, to the nonspecialist reader.
A great book for both young and adult readers.
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