A Brief History of Time

by Stephen Hawking

#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.

• ISBN10: 0553380168
• ISBN13: 9780553380163
• Publish Date: 1 September 1998 (first published 1 January 1988)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 4 November 2003
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
• Edition: Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary ed
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 240
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780553380163

Reviews

[thepunktheory]

Full review on my blog: www.thepunktheory.wordpress.com

I've always been interested in physics but unfortunately at my school there were basically no classes. So I felt less than informed on the topic and didn't know where to start to learn about it.
A Brief History of Time was certainly a good choice. First of all, Stephen Hawking tries to cover a lot of stuff and explains from the very beginning. Thus, the reader can follow the evolution of physic!
Furthermore, he uses some nice metaphors, to make it easier to grasp. It definitely helped to have a familiar picture that I could connect with the sometimes complicated topics.
Hawking tries hard to make this as understandable is somehow possible, so that we all can get an insight into the history of the universe. He doesn't always succeed and some stuff confused me a bit. But in general A Brief History of Time helped me a lot to learn about physics!

[celinenyx]

A long, long time ago, before I became a humanities student at university, I loved science. I adored physics in high school. Gravity, electromagnetic fields, laws of warmth - I devoured all subjects and was well-versed in the language of equations. I joined an extra-curricular science class, and visited the hadron collider in CERN. But physics disappeared from my life when I choose to pursue my dream of entering the literary field.

A Brief History of Time reminds me of why I frigging love physics. Hawking has an incredible love for his field, which penetrates every word he writes. Our understanding of the universe has boomed in the last fifty years, and A Brief History of Time gives a short overview of all modes of thought up until the time it was written.

What is fascinating to me is how reality is stranger than science-fiction writers think up. Especially the concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics are incredibly hard to wrap your mind around, and modern science is almost complete hocus-pocus for a lay person.

I don't think it's possible for someone without a background in science to understand A Brief History of Time. It probably all makes sense for Hawking himself, but for an ordinary person he might as well be speaking a foreign language. I understood about one third of everything he explains here, and that's only because I have followed classes on relativity and quantum mechanics for a year. Even in its incomprehensibleness, A Brief History of Time is utterly fascinating.

[empressbrooke]

Very readable, and I was actually surprised to realize I'd learned most of this information in an astronomy class I took in college. Who knew I was this educated?

The end of the book, where Hawking discusses the theories that scientists are currently trying to prove, started getting to be a bit above my head - in my lay opinion, I think it was a combination of Hawking getting a bit more vague and having fewer concrete facts and observations to state.