Infinite expansion, Big Crunch, singularity, static... There are many hypotheses about the fate of the Universe. Of them all, the theory of black hole evaporation formulated by Stephen Hawking is among the most fascinating. It is a model developed by Michael Wondrak, Walter van Sujlekom and Heino Falcke, astrophysicists at Radboud University in the Netherlands. According to this theory, the Universe is slowly evaporating. In this book, the two outstanding authors trace fascinating theoretical models related to space and time, their meaning in the immediate and ultimate cosmic boundary. The style is not academic, but like a conversation between friends. Wonderful.

Spacetime =Matter + Energy.
POSTED BY ME AT AMAZON 2002
We have 4 scientific essays here, about space, gravity and possibilities of traveling in time, many drawings, figures and pictures and only two math equations.
However, this writings are, in my opinion, for "advanced" laymen, who collect, cherish and have fully digested at least a "Brief History of Time" or other popular science books dealing with cosmology, quantum and relativity.
Introduction (essay number one) by Richard Price presents known facts about relativity, but author uses innovative way to teach us about different types of transformation between reference frames. With elegance he introduces concept of spacetime diagrams and worldliness. Good beginning.
Then comes Igor Novikov: his essay straightforward and easy to read. Supported by well designed drawings it explains how the wormhole can work and why it is rather impossible to kill your grandfather by traveling to the past.
If you have his book "River of Time", you will know what I am talking about.
Third essay by Stephen Hawking is rather hardly digestible highbrow dissertation, with plenty of inward shortcuts. Drawings and figures are not clear and without indications to which part of the text they belong. This part of the book is least meritorious, but... help can be found later.
The most impressive essay by Kip Thorne creates the hub of the book. Kip Thorne has proposed Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory in 1984 and is a cofounder of this project. He also believes in potential of a String Theory.
Thorne's current writing is an excellent addition to his famous book "Black Holes and Time Warps" published 8 years ago. He predicts now many interesting discoveries related to LIGO/LISA gravity waves project. If successful, this project will greatly contribute to new theory connecting general relativity with quantum fields and will help to solve mysteries of neutron stars and singularities. History of Thorne's bets with Hawking is funny and adds flavor to this chapter.
End of the book contains Glossary (whole 17 pages of it) and I read it with a big pleasure since this helped me to understand Hawking's text.
Last two essays about skills of popular writing in science were also interesting but of a less importance to me...

Algunos ensayos estaban realmente excelentes. Sin embargo, como la mayoría de los libros de "divulgación científica" creo que no es apto para todo público, ya que requiere muchos conocimientos previos de física avanzada.

2.5/5.0

I've never seen a group of authors more enthusiastic about killing their own grandfathers. These dudes are quite morbid.

Bueno

Hawking and Thorne stand out in this collection. As a collection of lectures, don't expect the science here to be diluted or awash in new-age speculation.

The Future of Spacetime was a hodgepodge, but a good hodgepodge. It's a collection of essays written regarding a research focus of Kip Thorne, who at the time of writing, had just celebrated KipFest: the 60th birthday celebration for one of physics' celebrated authors and thinkers.

Each essay took a decidedly different tone, with the preface, and first few essays delving into ever-deeper scientific concepts and jargon. I'll admit that I skipped a couple of pages in Hawking's essay when the terms got too technical and precise for me to follow. It was not one of his better attempts at science writing, going for esoteric over clear.

The real gem for me, and the reason it's rated four instead of three stars is the final essay by a gentleman whose name I forget and who I'm too lazy to get up and check. He's a fiction writer and physicist who studied under Kip Thorne. His essay covers his thoughts on the differences (and some similarities) between conducting physics and writing fiction. I felt myself drawn in when he started discussing an event very familiar to me, but one which I've only rarely heard discussed by anyone else: the removal of from one's conscious mind to a place of tranquil serenity in a place wholly mental, when body falls away. I've felt it in books, in the eureka moments of science and mathematics when a concept coalesces, and in moments with God. Reading this, expounded well, but expounded at all, was worth the extra star. Check it out.

One of the best science books I have ever read. Hawking exposes difficult concepts in a very didactic way. The last chapter is beautiful and an ode to science.

This is a collection of six lectures given in celebration of Kip Thorne's 60th birthday (an academic tradition). The lecture topics aren't exceptionally cohesive because the lecturers were selected based on the fact that they are all (1) famous scientists and (2) connected to Thorne in some way. For instance, Stephen Hawking is Thorne's collaborator and rival, and he lectures about time travel, whereas Alan Lightman is Thorne's ex-grad-student and he lectures about being a scientist-novelist.

This is a great resource if you are curious about what the cutting edge minds currently think about the possibilities of time travel. Could time travel into the past be possible or not? And if it is possible, how do you resolve the paradoxes that might result? Both Hawking and Novikov weigh in on this topic at length. Thorne's lecture is more of an overview about the upcoming interesting steps in spacetime research and so he spends a good deal of time discussing gravitational waves, though he does briefly touch on time travel at the end. Novikov's lecture involves a series of fascinating thought experiments (originally calculated by Kip Thorne) concerning time-traveling billiard balls and whether any paradoxical results are possible (for instance, a version of the grandfather paradox: if the corner pocket is a time machine, can a billiard ball time travel into the past and collide with itself, thereby preventing itself from entering the corner pocket/time machine in the first place?).

On that note, the lectures by Lightman (on being a novelist) and Ferris (on science popularization) should be readable by all, but on the whole these lectures were given FOR physicists BY physicists and so it is not a light read. For instance, I'd recommend being pretty solid with spacetime physics before jumping into the lectures on time travel.

Доволь��о интересное собрание презентаций по физике пространства-времени, черным дырам, гравитационным волнам, квантовым флуктуациям и возможности путешествия во времени. Для тех, кому интересны такие темы, рекоммендую. Книга не содержит "тяжелых" физических уравнений, так что будет более или менее понятна читателю, не знакомому с физикой пространства-времени, но желающему познакомиться с ней.

It was fun, but just okay. It's been a long time and I'm glad I read it, but it's not heavy literature or comprehensive. The most important thing it taught me is that scientists can have a sense of humor.