A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes

Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan

Bantam Books, 1990 - Black holes (Astronomy) - 198 pages

Stephen Hawking has earned a reputation as the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein. In this landmark volume, Professor Hawking shares his blazing intellect with nonscientists everywhere, guiding us expertly to confront the supreme questions of the nature of time and the universe. Was there a beginning of time? Will there be an end? Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries? From Galileo and Newton to modern astrophysics, from the breathtakingly cast to the extraordinarily tiny, Professor Hawking leads us on an exhilarating journey to distant galaxies, black holes, alternate dimensions--as close as man has ever ventured to the mind of God. From the vantage point of the wheelchair from which he has spent more than twenty years trapped by Lou Gehrig's disease, Stephen Hawking has transformed our view of the universe. Cogently explained, passionately revealed, "A Brief History of Time is the story of the ultimate quest for knowledge: the ongoing search for the tantalizing secrets at the heart of time and space.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - jcvogan1 - LibraryThing

First hundred pages are excellent, but then it gets to the then current day and becomes more a standard academic ‘this is what I think’ book.

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - benkaboo - LibraryThing

Summary: Deep dive summary of the world of physics over the last 500 odd years. Things I liked: Objective: Trying to break heavy duty science into the language and ideas that regular folk can ...

Contents

• I: 1
• II: 15
• III: 35

About the author

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England on January 8, 1942. He received a first class honors degree in natural science from Oxford University and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. He was a theoretical physicist and has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University from 1982 until his death. In 1974, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific organization. In 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The disease confined him to a wheelchair and reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements, but left his mental faculties untouched. He became a leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes. He wrote numerous books including A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Black Holes and Baby Universes, On the Shoulders of Giants, A Briefer History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Grand Design, and Brief Answers to the Big Questions. In 1982, he was named a commander of the British Empire. A film about his life, The Theory of Everything, was released in 2014 and was based on his first wife Jane Hawking's book Traveling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen. He died on March 14, 2018 at the age of 76.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
• Authors: Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan
• Illustrated by: Ron Miller
• Contributor: Carl Sagan
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Bantam Books, 1990
• ISBN: 0553346148, 9780553346145
• Length: 198 pages