A Brief History of Time | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Hawking
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  353 reviews
Sales Rank: 3171
Media: Paperback
Edition: 10 Anv
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0553380168
Dewey Decimal Number: 523.1
EAN: 9780553380163
ASIN: 0553380168
Publication Date: September 1, 1998
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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
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 348 more reviews...
 Easily readable and incredibly enjoyable December 2, 2008
This is a popular science classic that cannot be left outside any general astronomy/physics bookshelf.
Dr. Hawking explains, with the mastery of an able writer, the history and structure of the known universe, non-euclidean geometry, the laws of the small and of the large, the laws and fate of stars, black holes and singularities, and the very matter that builds us. It finishes with an argumentation about time, following the second law of thermodynamics, and mixing it with information theory (though not explicitly stated).
I personally love this book and, in my opinion, its a star (of the popular science books), as the material it is built from used to be.
Transport yourself into possibility. October 16, 2008
This book absolutely recreates the wonder I felt looking at the stars as a child. Stephen Hawking has a knack like no other I have read in the science world of transporting the reader to a realm of humbling amazement and possibility. Pure genius bubbling over with dry humor that will never fail to raise a smile as your senses burn with curiosity for our elegant and beautiful universe. I've had this book for years but it is still a favorite that I can't wait to share with my own son.
Highly recommended to everybody interested in Astronomy and Nuclear Physics October 14, 2008
Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest contemporary physicists explores in a very interesting and informative way the unresolved riddles about the universe and the structure of particles, energy, time, gravity, various forces in the universe, god and their relationship with one another. His approach is both scientific and philosophical raising questions about the meaning of human existence in the universe. Although quite detailed the questions raised and alternative explanations offered are appealing both to the amateur and the professional. Stephen Hawking approaches the fundamental issues from many aspects including Newtonian physics, Special and General Relativity of Einstein, Quantum physics, string theory etc. He compares the different approaches, explains how they arose historically and the quest for a unified theory of the universe. Of course he devotes a lot of time to the primary issue of the creation and possible end of the universe. His treatment of matter and antimatter are especially interesting. I had read the book many years ago, recently I listened to the audio CD. I recommend both as a rich source of knowledge about these topics from a leading scientist on these issues.
I also recommend The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Green which is also a very interesting exploration of the same issues.
 A bit too brief September 27, 2008
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.
Good, but hard September 24, 2008
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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