Review of "A Briefer History of Time," by Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow

 Review of

A Briefer History of Time, by Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow ISBN 9780593056974

Five out of five stars

Nobody writes popular science better than Hawking

 The overall area of cosmology encompasses two of the most complex and difficult concepts in science. Relativity and quantum mechanics. When Albert Einstein first proposed the general theory of relativity it was said that there were only two people in the world that understood it. Nobel prize winning Richard Feynmann famously said, “You don’t ever understand quantum mechanics, you just get used to it.” In cosmology, both of these concepts have to be combined.

 Given this formidable combination, this book is a very effective popular rendition of these two concepts and how they interact in the making of the universe we inhabit. Hawking explains how the universe is expanding and the detailed evidence for the beginning known as the “big bang.” The question as yet unresolved is whether the universe will forever expand or will at some point shift direction and move towards a collapse, forming another singularity that would likely explode once again.

 There are almost no equations in the book, all explanations are either visual or textual. They are well done. Anyone with a basic understanding of the structure of matter in terms of protons, neutrons and electrons will be able to understand it.

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