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A Brief History Of Time - From The Big Bang…
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A Brief History Of Time - From The Big Bang To Black Holes, Book Club Edition (original 1988; edition 1988)

by Stephen W. Hawking (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
14,148123403 (3.9)279
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. ( )
  jcvogan1 | Jan 25, 2023 |
English (96)  Spanish (6)  Dutch (3)  French (3)  Catalan (2)  Italian (2)  German (2)  Romanian (1)  Portuguese (Brazil) (1)  Slovak (1)  Greek (1)  Finnish (1)  All languages (119)
Showing 1-25 of 96 (next | show all)
Immediate buy at a library sale, interesting topics and fun to look up what has been discovered since the publish date 1988 and compare. Some diagram captions I had to laugh at - "WORLD-SHEET OF TWO OPEN STRINGS JOINING" ( )
  lneukirch | Feb 4, 2024 |
I don’t pretend to understand all the concepts of science or mathematics, or space. But I like it when scientific and history books make the matter they discuss more relatable and explainable for laypeople. I did giggle at some of the comments. ( )
  Elise3105 | Aug 13, 2023 |
I tried but uh I have no basic understanding of physics. A decade later and I still have no idea what the fuck he's talking about. My force of will expanded my read count to 150 pages longer than 18 year old me. I TRIED. I FAILED.
  fleshed | Jul 16, 2023 |
Partea despre timp, istoria teoriilor fizicii și univers în general (cam 2/3 din carte) a fost foarte interesantă, accesibilă de înțeles și pt nivel de fizică de liceu și suprinzător de captivantă (fizică citită ”light”, cu plăcere, cine-ar fi crezut?!).
Partea despre găuri negre (1/3 din carte) m-a plictisit și nu mi s-a părut că ar avea legătură cu restul, ci doar că-i place lui Hawkings subiectul (de aici minus un punct).
Oricum, recomandată oricui vrea să aibă un nivel basic de fizică și astronomie - și să nu se plictiseacă obținându-l. ( )
  milosdumbraci | May 5, 2023 |
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. ( )
  jcvogan1 | Jan 25, 2023 |
Brilliant. An overview of all the interesting physics that I hoped to understand. Unfortunately, Hawking doesn't manage to achieve that for me despite his use of excellent analogies and diagrams; maybe the odd formula or two would have helped? ( )
  tarsel | Sep 4, 2022 |
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 understand is a noble cause and one I endorse.

Style: I liked the chatty style with lots of allusion to his individual life and people he knew. Some of the metaphors he used really helped me to visualise some pretty crazy ideas (like shrinking and expanding universesusususs....).

Things I thought could be improved.

The Middle Bit: The first part is easy to follow and interesting. The last bit is thought provoking and provides a good justification of his purpose. The middle bit dives right off the deep end IMHO. I remember just telling myself to 'keep reading', kind of like when your listening to a really
brainy person talk. You don't understand 80% of what your hearing but have faith that it will all make sense towards the end. To some extent that's true of my experience, but I definately felt 'very' lost when he's going on about the spin of virtual particles and the underlying assumptions that have challenged theoretical physicists across the years.

Standout: The idea of a 'bumpy' big bang full of little irregularities that later became us and everything we know. Like blowing up balloon, it
starts out weird looking but ends up nice, round and smooth. ( )
  benkaboo | Aug 18, 2022 |
Wow. This book ends with little microbiographies of Einstein, Galileo, and Newton. That... was a treat.
  brutalstirfry | May 6, 2022 |
Not the best choice for an audiobook. It's very dense with a lot of information. I'll have to give it another try with an old-fashioned paper book. ( )
  NancyinA2 | Feb 3, 2022 |
Told in language we all can understand, A Brief History of Time plunges into the exotic realms of black holes and quarks, of antimatter and “arrows of time,” of the big bang and a bigger God–where the possibilities are wondrous and unexpected.
  BLTSbraille | Sep 6, 2021 |
Great read. ( )
  nitins | Jul 28, 2021 |
My copy says on the cover "the phenomenal international bestseller". It's certainly phenomenal. And fascinating. And mind blowing. And brilliant

This book is like a fine wine. Really smooth and delicious to read, extremely deep (and complex) and once you've finished you feel awesome and want more - but are also a little confused.

Like drinking a whole bottle of wine, it's not something I would recommend to everyone as it is quite demanding in places. Something to build up to, though with what I don't know.

This book was so engrossing I ended up having a 2 hour bath in cold water for most of it as I didn't want to stop reading to get out the bath. ( )
  mjhunt | Jan 22, 2021 |
Beautifully written, in the sense that I, a mere layperson, could understood a whole book on theoretical physics with minimum eye-glaze or supervision.

I would have loved this book being taught in a non-specialized school course, because this is the kind of stuff that feels really powerful and enlightening to know and yet doesn't mire you non-layperson rigour. It probably increases my literacy in levels beyond loose concepts used in television/movies for plot justification.

I am being mean-spirited by taking off one star for the sole purpose of indicating that this book did not fill me with a great subjective joy; in other ways, given my limited education on the matter, it seemed flawless from my frame of reference. Some of the book's 'banter' felt forced or dated. I am thankful the book went out of its way not to go into an anti-god diatribe and be gently charitable on the matter, and I assume the choice to address the possibility of the universe being god's creation was a purposeful one and an aim of the book (but the need for the aim wasn't apparent to me, even if I respect how it was done.) ( )
  NaleagDeco | Dec 13, 2020 |
I was back and forth on trying to figure out whether to give this 3 or 4 stars and eventually went with 3. Even if we could find the meaning of the universe or figure out exactly how it began—and I don’t think we completely could—what good would it do us? Regardless of what your religious beliefs are, I don’t think you would really be able to do anything with that information. There are some things we can’t know, and that is one of them. And we don’t need to know. What impact would it have on us? I’m all for asking questions until you get good answers, but, in this case…not so much. In one part he spoke about someday possibly being able to predict future events. What I want to know is why you would want to do that. That would be like knowing who you were going to marry before you even met the person.

Overall, it was very interesting and packed with information, but it's one of the longest short books I've ever read because I had to trudge through much of it. ( )
  littlebookjockey | Sep 15, 2020 |
This was actually my second time reading the book. Still a great read, very accessible for most people and a good pace through the different topics. It’s a bit dates in ways today but still overall very relevant. A really good introduction prior to reading more modern books on quantum relativity or string theory. ( )
  briandarvell | Aug 7, 2020 |
Is this book something you should read? Yes, I think it is. I think that this is one everyone should at least try to read. It’s a really good look at space-time, and teaches a lot about areas of science that most people assume they’ll never understand. I will fully admit that I don’t properly understand everything Hawking wrote about – I’d guess that I properly understood about half of it, and somewhat understood maybe another quarter (leaving at least another quarter of the material as completely over my head at the moment, and that doesn't touch on retention at all). Still: I learned something that I didn’t know before. And I’m reminded that there is still so much about this subject (which is a subject I like, and so have been casually studying for years) that I don’t know. Being reminded that you still have a lot to learn can be a wonderful thing, and Hawking presents that in such a way that you won’t feel like any less of a person because you still have more to learn. I think this is a book I’ll be revisiting over again and again. ( )
  ca.bookwyrm | May 18, 2020 |
Interesting, but extremely dense. What did you expect!!!!
  JohnLavik | Mar 29, 2020 |
Historia del tiempo es un libro de divulgación sobre el espacio y el tiempo escrito por uno de los físicos teóricos más prestigiosos de la actualidad. En él Stephen W. Hawking presenta de forma clara y concisa los conceptos fundamentales de la mecánica newtoniana, la teoría de la relatividad, la mecánica cuántica y la cosmología contemporánea, temas todos ellos que, junto a su interés intrínseco, permiten enmarcar el problema de fondo tratado en el libro: el origen del universo y la creación del espacio-tiempo, llegando a asomarse a campos más amplios y aventurados, como la metafísica e incluso la teología, al plantearse la naturaleza de un Dios creador, o más bien garante del sentido del universo
  Haijavivi | Jun 6, 2019 |
I am mostly reading this book to finish off my list of must-read books, and as I've been curious about this book for many years, since Carl Sagan wrote his introduction (as I seeem to recall, about the same time he was the keynote speaker for the joint session in 1992 in DC of the two major astronomical and physics societies in the US).

I had not known that we knew that the speed of light was finite so early (1676?) -I thought that had been discovered by Einstein and confirmed by the Michaelson-Moorely experiment.

Very nice to see Bell Labs from [b:Three Degrees Above Zero: Bell Laboratories in the Information Age|3602937|Three Degrees Above Zero Bell Laboratories in the Information Age|Jeremy Bernstein|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|3645654] mentioned.

I didn't finish the book as it seems to repeat a good deal of physics that I have already read years ago, like [b:The Holographic Universe|319014|The Holographic Universe|Michael Talbot|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347752336s/319014.jpg|1842572], which I recall being far more interesting, and am no longer as interested in today. ( )
  FourFreedoms | May 17, 2019 |
Glad I finally picked this up off the "to-read" shelf. There are a bunch more amusing asides than I expected, which were a nice surprise. I'm not sure Hawking gets the pitch right throughout the book (sometimes the level of technical detail is very low, sometimes it's very high) but overall it's a very interesting book. ( )
1 vote JBD1 | Aug 23, 2018 |
In the ten years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking's classic work has become a landmark volume in scientific writing, with more than nine million copies in forty languages sold worldwide. That edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the intervening years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic worlds. These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book, including the recent discoveries of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), which probed back in time to within 300,000 years of the universe's beginning and revealed wrinkles in the fabric of space-time that he had projected. Eager to bring to his original text the new knowledge revealed by these observations, as well as his own recent research, Professor Hawking has prepared a new introduction to the book, written an entirely new chapter on wormholes and time travel, and updated the chapters throughout.
  Cultural_Attache | Jul 30, 2018 |
A Brief History of Time strives to questions like "where did the universe come from?" and "how will it end?". Hawking uses two theories to communicate how scientists answer these questions; general relativity and quantum mechanics. The book starts with a history of physics, Newton, Einstein, and all that jazz. Then it goes into how the universe is expanding. After that, Hawking tells about the idea that we could understand the universe's future as long as we knew everything about it at any time during the past or present. He also talks about how that theory was debunked, by quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. Next, it delves into the quark, the smallest known bits in the universe that are thought to make up everything. Then, we learn what happens when a star's fuel supply dries up. Moreover, the book covers the origin and fate of our universe. Lastly, Hawking talks about his three types of time theory and time travel. I absolutely loved this book. It made me think about how little I actually understood about, well, everything! Even though it made me a little confused sometimes, it taught me so much. I especially liked learning about quarks and time travel. It was very well written, also. In addition, I liked learning about the origin of the universe. This book just helps prove that Stephen Hawking was a genius. ( )
  AriannaC.B4 | Mar 22, 2018 |
As a fairly frequent reader of popular science, I've heard some of the stuff in A Brief History of Time described better elsewhere (particularly string theory), but how could you not want to spend some time in the company of one of the finest intellects of our time? Hawking was (and still is) a pioneer of some of the discoveries unpacked here, and he brings us into his thought process and how he came to make these deductions. This makes it different from many other popular science books, but it is also thrilling in itself.

Some of the deductions made in astronomy are awe-inspiring – just think how impressive an intellect an ancient Greek or Renaissance man must be to overcome the myths of his time and understand the complexities of planetary orbits, just from looking through a telescope and doing some maths, let alone a modern astrophysicist conceptualizing black holes, spacetime and string theory. It makes you proud of mankind (even if your brain throbs trying to understand it) that 'we' are discovering this stuff (to this very day, with things like the Higgs boson and gravitational waves). It is exploration not physical, but with pure thought. If you want to map a coastline, you sail along it. If you discover an island, you have to stumble across it. But space doesn't allow that physical contact. This is something else – something even more impressive. It is a fine testament to the logical capabilities of the human mind. ( )
2 vote MikeFutcher | Mar 6, 2018 |
Wow. Surprisingly not completely beyond my reach. I can certainly see the usefulness of a discussion group for this type of book in a 101 or AP level course. (As my mind reaches back to how much fun it would have been to go through this book with my HS Physics teacher... reminds me that I must reread Flatland.) ( )
  lissabeth21 | Oct 3, 2017 |
Un emozionante viaggio nel tempo cercando di dare risposte ai tanti quesiti della nostra esistenza. Certo un libro che va letto con molta attenzione e sebbene è molto semplice e comprensibile, non è di facile assimilazione. ( )
  Angelo_Lamacchia | May 15, 2017 |
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