A Brief History of Time

Title: A Brief History of Time (Illustrated Version)

Author: Stephen Hawking

Pages: 248

Genre: Science

Grade: B+

Synopsis: This book covers complex topics that are typically discussed in college courses on Modern Physics (such as the course I took at the University of Utah). The famous physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffers from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), has a knack for explaining difficult topics in a way that the general population can understand (or at least grasp an idea of the concept). Topics covered in the book include Galileo and gravity, Newtonian physics, Maxwell's equations (which govern the study of electromagnetics), the Doppler effect, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Einstein's theories of relativity, black holes, wormholes, time travel and lengthy discussions of the origin and fate of the universe.

My Review: While I've taken various classes that have covered many of these topics, I found Hawking's explanations and the diagrams to be very helpful in understanding everything. I don't think that I would have enjoyed the non-illustrated version of the book as much as I enjoyed the illustrated version. The book can get a little boring at times, but for the most part it held my attention fairly well.

From the Book: "(p. 2) 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 teh 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 turtles all the way down!"

"(p. 48) In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars."

"(p. 62) Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible."