A good overview of Hawking's early work, but a lot's happened in cosmological physics since the book was published. It'd be a good warm-up for A Brief History of Time.

Loved this book! I checked it out from our local public library, which doesn't always have the most modern options. But even a nearly 30-year-old biography of Hawking was fascinating. It definitely makes me want to read more by and about him.

A decent quick introduction to many of the concepts developed/studied by Hawking through the early '80s. Hawking's own books provide much more depth.

Of the Science writers who I love reading, Richard Feynman, James Gleick, Mary Roach, Simon Singh, there is a common characteristic. There is glee in their voice that comes from a childlike excitement for knowledge, a naive curiosity that is bolstered by the personalities of the scientists/ authors. Science is just a vehicle for them to go on an intellectual odyssey, a tool that helps them find prospective paths to answers of our most fundamental questions.

John Boslough reveres Hawking. He seems fairly erudite in Theoretical Physics. But it's one thing to know something, totally another to be able to convey about it in such a way that the reader's enthusiasm is lit. And there Boslough falls short. This is not a bad book as much an incomplete mishmash of all things Big Bang, Hawking's life and new discoveries in Cosmology. The difficulty level of the matter alternated between fairly understandable and way-over-my-head. Boslough didn't seem to have been clear about his target audience, or what exactly he wanted to talk about. Overall, not recommended.

Muy bueno. Lo compré sin querer junto con otros 5, y pues es mi primer libro de la colección de ciencia de Salvat. El libro está narrado a modo de entrevista, ya que Boslough estuvo en diversas ocasiones en el despacho de Hawking, en donde nuestro querído físico-teórico explica muchas cosas, desde el límite de Planck hasta los primeros minutos del Big Bang. Obviamente un tema importante en el libro es todo lo relacionado con los agujeros negros, en donde se nos habla mucho de Sir Roger Penrose, colaborador de Hawking, y del descubrimiento de la radiación de Hawking, lo cual demostró que los agujeros negros no son del todo negros, y eventualmente sentó las bases de la paradoja de la conservación de la información. El libro también explica mucho sobre particulas elementales, ya que Hawking se especializó en ese tema. El libro incluye ilustraciones y un discurso sobre el futuro de la física teórica.

i like this book

It was a quick and easy read (even though I took nearly a quarter of a year to finish it). I enjoyed comparing what scientists of the ‘80s understood about our world versus modern physics. Overall, it is a nice and short book detailing the life of an ‘equal of Einstein.’

Also terrific

I am giving it four stars because the information is a bit dated. However, this is an excellent reference into the scientist Stephen Hawking and his achievements in his study of Black Holes. I highly recommend this for background info.

This is a great, if a bit dated, explanation of theoretical physics.

I wanted to read this book now only because it was a loaner from a very good friend who always recommends good reading but because it is the beginning of a new year and I thought why not start with a book about the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe, the beginning of everything. This is a tough subject for me because I tend not to be science oriented but it is a fascinating subject. I would like to know what happened during the twenty years follow the publication of his book in 1980. The last chapter indicates that they would be an end in sight for theoretical physics and some significant changes were anticipated by Stephen Hawkings in the next 20 years. Now 37 years has passed I'm interested to see if there is another book like this which is fairly easy to read for me so that I may follow up on this topic. Has theoretical physics ended? " The author writes in the last chapter that " Hawking said, that's soon mankind will have a new theory that would explain what the universe was like at the very beginning and white behaves today the way it does." I'd like to know if that happened.

This is a well-written book by someone who had face to face interaction with Hawking and was able to discuss his research and theories with intelligence. Much of the book was over my head, but I did enjoy and, I hope, understand at a layman's level the chapters on relativity , black holes, the Big Bang, and Hawking radiation.