The Universe in a Nutshell

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: At last, an amazing and comprehensible book by one of the greatest individuals in science alive today. I found the book easy to read and totally enjoyable, with humor, understanding and humanity. Some of the most complex notions of science are explained here for those who want to figure out how the universe works. The text is just wonderful, and the art helps also to get it all together in the lay-mind. Brilliant. A must-buy.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Simple Brilliance!
Review: The Universe in a Nutshell is the best popular science book I have ever read. Professor Stephen Hawking deserves many more than five stars for this book!

If you have any interest in understanding the latest attempts to create a unified scientific Theory of Everything in the universe, this is the book for you. Professor Hawking has combined many perspectives to show how Einstein's special and general theories of relativity have been updated to explain the big bang, black holes, and an expanding universe; superstring theory; p-branes; how many dimensions the universe has; whether the future can be predicted in a deterministic way; whether time travel is possible; how science will transform our biological and thinking futures in the context of Star Trek technology; and M-theory to consider whether "we live on a brane or are we just holograms?" Although any of these subjects can be found in popular science books, few such books discuss all of them simply and intelligently in terms of each other from the theoretical perspective and experimental evidence.

Those who wonder what science has to say about religious ideas will find this book valuable, for Professor Hawking is unafraid to address questions about whether there can be a beginning to the universe in a scientific sense. What could or could not have preceded the big bang?

Fans of A Brief History of Time (1988) will find that Professor Hawking has made two changes to make this book more accessible to the nonphysicist. First, he as written the book so that you can follow the argument solely through the many beautiful and helpful illustrations and their captions. The method parallels the one he used successfully in the 1996 book, The Illustrated Brief History of Time. Second, only the first two chapters are required reading to understand the rest of the book. You can read chapters 3-7 in any order after the first two, which means that you can get into the material that will be of most interest to you much sooner!

Professor Hawking's sense of humor also lightens the subject a lot. The book has witticisms, puns, and visual jokes galore to make you chuckle, from funny Shakespearean quotes ("I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space." Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2), to images from his appearance in the Star Trek: Next Generation television show (where he won at poker with Einstein . . . and had a mysterious visitor sit on his lap), to tales of bets lost and won, to unexpected comments about the effect of airline food on your life expectancy.

To make the material less dense, he also includes biographical information about the quirks of the physicists who have made these marvelous discoveries.

If you are fairly knowledgeable about physics, you will find this a fairly quick read . . . but one that will stimulate new flights of thought that can keep you busy for years. For example, he describes the physical limits of population growth and electricity being reached on earth by 2600. Then he goes on to speculate about how knowledge expansion through books can carry us forward faster to solutions than our geometric physical expansion. The future may well include major changes in the physical qualities of what a human is, a better connection between our brains and our electronic extensions, and the need to solve a delicate problem of where we should design for speed . . . and where for handling more complexity.

My favorite chapter was the one on predicting the future. My next favorite one related to the relevance of Star Trek to our future. I found the chapter on the Universe in a Nutshell to be the most fascinating as Professor Hawking explains the case for multiple histories occurring based on Richard Feynman's work.

Ultimately, one of the beauties of this book is the marvelous human spirit behind it. Professor Hawking seems like Leonardo to me, bought forward to today to challenge us to be our best as people and as thinkers. I feel honored to sit and learn at his feet.

I recommend that you reread this book once a year, because your thinking will be stimulated again and again by this outstanding overview of how all of our theories of reality may fit together.

One of the lessons of this book is that much of what we think of as "fact" is merely a convenient approximation of a more complex circumstance. Newton's thinking about gravity is a good example. Where in your life do you need to know with as much precision as possible, and where will approximations work just fine? Making that choice well can be the most important talent you can develop.

See beyond your limited perspective to the pulsing reality around us!

Rating:
Summary: Heavy stuff presented heavilly.
Review: If you did not get on with Hawking's last great popular opus (A Brief History of Time) because you found it obscure, then you'll feel totally out of your depth with this tome.

One gets the feeling that Hawkin doesn't know who he's writing for, and so he tries to simplify but still includes so much jargon that the meaning of the text remains obscure.

There are some really great diagrams included with the text, presumably to illustrate the meaning of complex themes that Hawking is trying to explore. Regrettably, the diagrams don't help much; were they even at the right point of the book?

One is led to suspect that Hawking is trying to gain another huge selling book to garner further income for his family before he dies. The shame of this lies in the fact that he is undoubtedly well-versed and respected in his field but he forgets that the average man in the street may only have two or three years of secondary school physics or maths education. Thus, they are functionally illiterate in Hawking's field, and I fear that he aimed the book too high.

Rating:
Summary: "Curled Dimensions" or Just Mimicking the Usual Three?
Review: Sir:
"Curled Dimensions" or Just Mimicking the Usual Three?
The claims by Hawking (The World in a Nutshell) and Greene (The Elegant Universe) to be close to a theory of everything (TOE) are premature in two essential ways:
1.A true TOE would start with a definition of theory and proceed to a theory of knowledge or epistemology.
2.The idea that nature has 10 or more hidden spatial dimensions "all curled up" is just an artificial way to give their physically impossible one dimensional strings enough degrees of environmental freedom to mimic a real three dimensional object.
3.Wolfram's "New Kind of Science", along with Fredkin's attempt to model the world as a cellular automaton will not work either, for cellular automata can neither be programmed nor given a physical basis. There is neither computable software nor identifiable hardware.
4.I discuss all this in my forthcoming booklet "The World" (Core Books, Summer, 2004, [e-mail]). See also www.worldtheory.org.

INSTITUTE FOR AXIOMATIC KNOWLEDGE
AND SYSTEMATIC EDUCATION
Annapolis, MD USA
Donald O. Rudin, M.D., President.
Professor, Mathematical Epistemology

Rating:
Summary: Hawking's Quantum Leaps Leave Knowledge Gaps
Review: PROS: Beautifully illustrated, concise, and approachable.

CONS: Although Hawking explains many concepts quite clearly, occasionally he just makes huge assumptions that the reader "gets it." This is frustrating because it's hard to connect to the theoretical dots. Science buffs are left feeling incomplete.

CONCLUSION: Hawking is smart, but just like some of the smartest professors in college were bad teachers, he fits the same stereotype. Nevertheless, there's enough nuggets in here to make it worthwhile. It's a tough topic and it's hard to cover it perfectly. This book does a good job overall.

Rating:
Summary: A better intro than A Brief History of Time
Review: With The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking does what he failed to do in A Brief History of Time. Hawking wrote A Brief History including only one equation, E=mc^2, in his desire to make it accessible to virtually anyone. Yet there was something missing. While it didn't go over my head, I was surprised by how many friends who borrowed that book also failed to finish it claiming it was too technical.

After I read The Universe in a Nutshell, I lent it to a few friends and all but one completed it. The ones that did finish reading it, all felt that, although they didn't comprehend 100% of it, they did have a general understanding of each topic of cosmology that Hawking touched upon. To tell you the truth, at first, I wasn't sure myself what differs between The Universe in a Nutshell and A Brief History of Time. In fact, I glanced at them both side by side and couldn't really identify a simpler language that makes this book more accessible to the layperson than A Brief History of Time was -- yet, it is more accessible.

Smartly, Hawking broke the book into several independent sections. He lays the foundation at the beginning and analogizes it to the trunk of a tree. Each successive part is a new branch (superstrings, relativity theory, black holes, quantum mechanics, etc.) and not connected to the other branches. He encourages readers to read the parts in any order they feel comfortable. It's an ingenious way to structure a book aimed at giving readers a general understanding of the forefronts of cosmology. Ultimately, it may be this Trunk and Branch structure that puts this book above A Brief History of Time and not the language. Most other advanced physics/mathematics books aimed at general readers fail I believe because they use a pyramidal (build on the last chapter) approach used mostly in textbooks.

Rating:
Summary: Best Non-Physicists Book on Physics Ever by a Physicist
Review: Okay, im 16 and unlike most of these other reviewers im not a genius, when my dad first bought this book i lost track in the second chapter and forgot about it. Then i read Bill Bryson's excellent laymans guide to science, 'A short History of nearly everything' especially the short section on quantum mechanics, this inspired me to return to this book.
I found that if you're prepared to realise that there are some things that need other knowledge to understand and other things that may be beyond your comprehension then you can still gain an awful lot of knowledge and understanding from this book, knowledge that would inspire you to (as i did) find the knowledge to understand more.
I think this is a fantastic book that inspires and informs even for people with very little scientific background, if you were inspired by bryson to discover more about the cutting edges of cosmology and physics then this is a great place to start

Rating:
Summary: Great but difficult
Review: This book was what I hoped it would be; challenging and informative. I have to say that Hawkings does a good job at breaking the theories and ideas down to the basics, but even then, it can be extremely difficult to understand. For example; I didn't understand p-branes at all until the last few pages of the book where the simplest of ideas could have been stated before, and imaginary time I never understood. I understand time moving at parallel to real time, using imaginary numbers, but I don't understand the effect, cause, and meaning of it and this is surely a heartbreak being that a large amount of material is based on this theory.

This is more of a study book than a readthrough. While most of the diagrams are useful, some are worthless. I would highly recommend those of even moderate physics understandings to take time with this book and give study to the illustrations and statements or the meaning can easily be lost.

I don't agree with hawkings on many of the accepted theories, and I don't understand some of what is said, but I fully recommend this book because it makes one think, and discover.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing look at the beautiful wonders of our universe
Review: In The Universe in a Nutshell, the amazing scientist Stephen Hawking takes the reader on a journey of all the various theories concerning the nature of our vast universe. These theories are so fantastical that they really stretch the limits of your imagination, yet they are grounded in real research by some of the best minds in the world.

Hawking addresses topics such as the quest among much of the physics community to unite Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum mechanics, which would describe the universe on scales of lightyears all the way down to the atomic level. He introduces amazing concepts such as imaginary time and the possibility of our universe consisting of up to 10 or 11 dimensions. He even addresses the possibility of time travel and alien life.

The book has wonderful illustrations which help one to grasp the profound concepts with which Hawking deals. Also, the book is written in such a manner that each chapter can basically stand on its own. If you liked A Brief History of Time, I'm sure you'll like this.

This is a really great book and if you have any interest in getting a glimpse into the most incredible, yet compelling theories of the universe this book would certainly be for you.