My review of Brief History of Time - Art

<p>This science book was the first of Hawking's which i read, but still my favourite. If you haven't read it yet, I heartily advise you. Below is the flap cover text from the hardback: Stephen W. Hawking has realized international prominence as one of the fantastic minds of the last century. Now, for the first time, he has written a popular work exploring the outer limits of our understanding of astrophysics and the nature of time and the world.The result is a really informative book: a classic introduction to today's most important technological concepts about the world, and a special opportunity to experience the understanding of one of the most original, important thinkers of our age. From the standpoint of the wheelchair where he has spent the last twenty years trapped by Lou Gehrig's disease, Stephen W. Hawking himself has changed our vision of the world. His groundbreaking research into black holes offers clues to that elusive timewhen the world was created. Now, in the
incisive style which is his trademark, Stephen W. Hawking illustrates people how mankind's "world picture" has started out the moment of Aristotle through the 1915 development of Albert Einstein, to the fascinating methods of today's prominent young physicists. Was there a beginning of time? Will there be an end? Is the galaxy infinite? Or is there boundaries? Using these fundamental problems in head, Professor Hawking reviews the awesome hypotheses of the universe-- and all the questions, paradoxes and contradictions still unresolved. With great care he explains Galileo's and Newton's discoveries. Next Hawking takes us step-by-step throught Einstein's general relativity theory and then moves on to the other great theory of our century, quantum mechanics (which concerns the extraordinarily tiny). And final, Hawking expores the worldwide effort to combin the 2 into a single quantum theory of gravity, the unified theory, which should resolve all the mysteries left unsolved --
and he shows why he believes that momentous discovery is not far off. Hawking also moves into the amazing realms of deep space, distant universe, black holes, quarks, GUTs, particles with "flavors" and "spin, " antimatter, the "arrows of time" -- and intrigues us with their surprising effects. He reveals the unsettling probabilities of time running backward when an expanding galaxy collapses, a world with as many as eleven dimensions, an idea of a "no boundary" galaxy that may change the big bang theory and a God who could be increasingly fenced in by the new discoveries-- who may be the prime mover in the creation of it all. Of course, This book to those who are still interested in physics, cosmology, natural philosophy or the history of technology and who have already acquired some knowledge of technology either through study or by the reading of other books. And i want to say, that in 1991, Errol Morris directed a documentary film about Stephen W. Hawking, but although t
hey share a name, the movie is a biographical review of Hawking, and not a filmed version of the book.
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