I'm delighted that we will continue to appreciate Hawking's comprehensive explanations of the Universe with their clear and simple analogies. For instance, I had never thought of the world's population as a gauge of our technical capacity to protect life, but that makes perfect sense. But true to his style, it is an uphill battle of ideas and reflections. In another quote, he makes fun of humanity for claiming to be intelligent and, worse yet, for using intelligence as a survival value. However, bacteria can survive for millions of years without any kind of intelligence. Finally, I am really wondering if he managed to draw all the illustrations by himself, because it looks like as he was really enjoying that process as well, he might be an abstract painter.

4 STARS.

I still think A Brief History of Time is my favorite and probably also the best starting point for anyone interested in Stephen Hawking's books (for noobs like me). But The Universe in a Nutshell was a great read as well! Stephen's humor shines through here and there, as usual, which always makes me chuckle.

I loved reading about all the theories and looking at the pictures and the models, which really helped me get a grasp and understand what he was talking about. The idea of the brane world model is so interesting to me! It's crazy to think how far science has come and what wonders we've uncovered!
One of the coolest things to me were Stephen's predictions of the future and future developments. The book was published in 2001, so a few predictions already came true or at least, now we know a little more about what he wrote about than 20 years ago.

Reading books like this (another GREAT example would be Cosmos by Carl Sagan) always makes me sad I didn't really appreciate science classes like chemistry and physics and even math in school. Granted, my physics teacher never actually held any "real classes" and chemistry always seemed so abstract and unimportant to me... Nowadays, I've definitely changed my mind on that, I think all of it is so interesting and I love educating myself about these topics even when I don't have a chance of becoming "good" at any of these disciplines. I'm fine with that though. I'll gladly continue reading books by people who are way smarter than me. And Stephen Hawking definitely was one of those people. I'll always admire him as a person and as a scientist.

Simply, I love the way of Stephen Hawking in explaining his beliefs and knowledge, I think he's the most smartest man living on earth right now.

In every chapter of his books he's showing us a great review about the universe.

In this book I was surprised that he can easly explains how biology works as well.

My next book written by his is A briefier History of Time

I feel kinda bad critiqueing Stephen Hawking, but this book felt like a mess. The ideas weren't really properly explained, it was mostly just: "Oh, me and Penrose, we proved that..." and he just tells us what they proved but there is no story behind the ideas, nothing feels personal or enthusiastic, whatever. It also makes it harder to read because that's boring. Also I feel like he wanted to explain too much too fast so the book doesn't feel unified. The illustrations are amazing tho.

czuje się mądrzejsza

In this book, Hawking writes nicely about Einstein’s theories and the scientific revolution that happened during the early XX century…

However, there are many issues I find within his way of thinking: First, he makes too many hypotheses, but he does not appreciate any thought that is not about the physical world. In my view, science (including Physics) is biased by philosophy, and philosophy is biased by language. Philosophy and language do not belong to physics… Second, he argues positivism is the right way for scientific knowledge. I don’t agree with that, because intuition matters as much as deduction within scientific development. Moreover, some things are not “provable” through mathematical models, as Hawking himself states in this book…
There is a point in the book where the author makes a joke out of astrology, which I think is just ridiculous, because he is trying to be 100% positivist and astrology cannot be even discussed within a positivist viewpoint.

'The Universe In A Nutshell' is a sequel to 'A Brief History of Time' nevertheless you can head straight to it if you haven't read the first one. Written in simple lucid language and attempts to explain some of the most complex concepts and theories about how our universe came to be and how it works!

It is understandable and informative. You can consider reading it if you want to have firsthand experience of what Scientists think about space-time and origin of universe.

As I renew my quest to dominate the world of casual physics, I am again met with the intellectually formidable presence of Stephen Hawkings.

This actually has to be my least favorite of the Hawkings authored physics lite book, its lacks the accessibility that the other books inexorably maintained. My Astronomy 101 class (as always) proved integral to my understanding of the mysteries of the universe.

I do however respect that Hawking appears to be the dude that can write about science without dragging religion into it unduly. It appears in this work but you can tell he doesn't study science to attack some vengeful God of his youth.

Read the Brief/Briefers first. If u like dem reed dis.

SECTION: HERALD REVIEW/Books
File: uni.doc
Words: 712
By Omar Ali
Wanted: Nutcracker
tThe number of books trying to explain science to the 'layman' has simply exploded in the last few years. But Professor Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, remains the biggest star in the field. although his first book, A Brief History of Time, sold over a million copies, Hawking is well aware that far too many readers never made it beyond the first few pages. So he says he set out to write "a different kind of book that might be easier to understand." Hawking's new book The Universe in a Nutshell is beautifully produced but breaks very little new ground, conveying little more than a 'take it on faith' explanation of what physicists think of the cosmos.
t The first two chapters introduce relativity and the problems of reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics. While the illustrations are some of the best you will ever see in a science book, there is almost no attempt to try and explain the reasoning that led Einstein to his revolutionary conclusions. These chapters provide a kind of general introduction to the subject and are followed by a series of essays on various aspects of modern cosmology. The discerning reader will come away with some vague understanding that modern physics has rejected the common sense views of time and space, that general relativity and quantum effects somehow need to be reconciled, that there is something very important called the "uncertainty principle", (even though it's not as uncertain as you thought: God may not know the position and the momentum of a particle to perfection, but he does know the wave function), black holes exist, naked singularities probably do not and it might all come down to strings that vibrate in 10 or 11 dimensions (but we can't really know for sure till we build a particle accelerator larger than the solar system).
t The penultimate chapter has some interesting speculation about how life and intelligence may evolve in the future and the final chapter gives a very light introduction to M-theory, which seems to be Hawking's current favourite for a possible "theory of everything": one grand framework to explain the known universe, from big bang to big crunch and everything in between (though, like Robert Frost, physicists are still unsure if it will end in fire or in ice).
tAlong the way, Hawking tells us several times that he is a positivist, which means he really can't say what all this "means", except that it is a mathematical model which fits observations and makes predictions that work. But this philosophical reticence seems at odds with a persistent hopefulness that the full explanation is around the corner. Why should we expect any such total understanding in the near future? Is it not more likely that in science, as in theology, we have only just begun? That our descendants may well see what we cannot even begin to imagine? And their descendants even further?
tThe physicist Freeman Dyson has said: "As a scientist, I live in a universe of overwhelming size and mystery. The mysteries of life and language, good and evil, chance and necessity, and of our own existence as conscious beings in an impersonal cosmos are even greater than the mysteries of physics and astronomy. Behind the mysteries that we can name, there are deeper mysteries that we have not even begun to explore". It is this awareness that seems to be missing in Hawking's book. (One dare not think that it is missing from professor Hawking himself.) Ultimately, Universe in a Nutshell is a coffee table book that is not detailed enough to teach you anything original and yet far too complicated for many scientific illiterates to follow. But it may well serve as a good introduction and lead the reader to other books that do a better job of actually explaining the physics as well as other mysteries that extend far deeper.

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