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Summary: What If He Has The Inside Track?
Review: Being an engineer you'd think I'd have a leg up on the average reader. But, I've been in management for over 20 years and what I remember about physics wouldn't get me past, a high school physics test. However, I must commend Hawking for his excellent writing style or perhaps to the astute editors who polished the work. I have read about other dimensions, time travel, string theory, and black holes, and find it all so fascinating. This is not a scientific tomb, but a special journey through Hawking's genius mind and the what ifs of the possible. I just finished reading 'Unconventional Flying Objects,' by Dr. Paul Hill and 'Alien Rapture,' by Edgar Fouche and found them to also be thought provoking. You will enjoy the copious color illustrations in this book He is really a national treasure. I highly recommend any of Hawking's books.
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Summary: A good starting point for the uninitiated layman.
Review: People who try to write books about physics or other (to the layman, anyway) arcane topics have a problem: How do you make complex topics best described mathematically accessible to the math adverse layman? Hawking tackles that challenge in The Universe in a Nutshell. Through simplified text, lots of nifty illustrations, and a prose style that focuses on a short, quick hitting, modular sort of presentation style, Hawking attempts to render the complex and often obscure notions of cosmology and physics simply enough for the interested but uninitiated reader to comprehend. On the whole, he succeeds rather well. There are the inevitable sections where the translation from math to verbiage fails to make the transition well, but for the most part the accompanying illustrations will get the reader through to an understanding of the primary point, if not the fine points, of the discussion. A lot has been written in prior reviews comparing this to A Brief History of Time. The comparison is fatuous. These books are aimed at different markets-the prior at the more sophisticated and initiated reader, this at the less sophisticated, less initiated reader. They aren't comparable works-one is intended to be simpler, more basic, than the other. That it is does not render it a "inferior" work. Personally, I think Hawking deserves credit for genuinely trying to provide all level of interested reader an access point to these ideas and concepts. If you are a more enlightened sort about these topics, skip this book-you probably won't learn anything new. If you think "string theory" explains why those tin-can-with-string "phones" we played with as kids work, then this is probably the book for you!
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Summary: pretty pictures, but no substance
Review: I give the 2 stars for the illustrators. They did a superb job trying to represent the ideas put on paper by Hawking. However the text on the other hand was overly simplified to appeal to a larger, non-science centric audience, who don't understand the complex formulas and ideas the govern the universe. He went too simplistic in this book and left out the explanations for what he says. He claims something is true, but never explains why or how. He never goes into the explanation of the illustrations so looking at some of them leaves me wondering "what does that mean?" Also, there are way too many illustrations and not enough text.
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Summary: A truely fantastic Book
Review: I can't say enough about this book. I could not put it down. Dare I say it but it was actually more fluid and easier to understand than Brief History of TIme. But the greatest value of this book is the sidebars and illistrations, which go much more indepth. I thought I would never be able to understand m-theory after finnaly geting my head around superstring theory, but Hawking's book explained it well enough that I could.
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Summary: Illustrations are second to none
Review: Let's face it. You're not buying this book to teach yourself physics. Hawking knows this, and it the reason the book isn't full of equations. What sells this book is the incredible artwork. This is the kind of book you would put on your coffee table for visitors to see. The pictures alone are worth the cost of the book.
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Summary: A Fantastic Reference Work
Review: Hawkings and O'Reilly team up to produce one of the most useful technical manuals published in the past year. Hawkings has put together an accessible reference work for the non-techies among us, a veritable how-to for building, deploying and maintaining your own universe. All of the constants one would expect are present, with drill-down treatment of those factors essential to the rise of life. But Hawkings offers more than a simple recitation; instead, unlike many technical authors, he actually seems to care whether or not the reader understands the material, and in pursuit of this end he provides an at-times almost too-detailed [though still understandable, don't get me wrong] discussion of the WHYs as well as the HOWs of universe making. In addition to top-notch content, the book itself reflects the high standards of production that one has come to expect of the O'Reilly 'In a Nutshell' series. The RepKover, "a durable and flexible lay-flat binding," makes it easy to set this book atop your workbench and read along while piecing together your own universe, and the text and font selection ensure that the reading is easy on the eye as well as tasty to the mind. And the Colophon selection, which initially may puzzle all but the most clever of readers, will reveal itself as an apt choice, once the lessons contained in this volume have been grokked.
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Summary: An enjoyable but challenging book
Review: This is the long-awaited follow-up to "A Brief History of Time". It's quite amazing how some of the ideas around the Physics of the very large and very small have developed in recent years, and Stephen Hawking is determined to communicate them to us. He realises that this requires diagrams and analogies, since the mathematics is getting ever more forbidding. As a result, unlike a lot of books on modern Physics and cosmology, this one focuses on pictures and spatial representations. It's beautifully illustrated throughout, almost a coffee-table book. That said, Hawking hasn't neglected the text either - it's clear, concise and frequently humourous. The book starts with the key ideas developed in the earlier part of the 20th century, Relativity and Quantum Theory, but in the context of more recent experiments and observations, which makes it feel more contemporary than more historical accounts. The second chapter explains how these developed through to the 1980s, summarising the various attempts at unified "Theories of Everything". The book's central chapter investigates what we now know about how the Universe formed and developed, presenting a lot of quite new findings and concepts. After this, the going starts to get harder, introducing concepts like time travel through black holes, and the physics of the strangely-named "p-branes". You may need to read these several times, and understanding is by no means guaranteed, but Hawking rightly focuses on the key implications rather than the models themselves. The penultimate chapter is a bit of a non-sequiteur, looking at the evolution of human and artificial intelligence. It's a fascinating subject, well described and clearly of great interest to Hawking, but doesn't quite fit with the rest of the book. Finally, the book presents some of the most recent ideas of unified theories - branes again - and makes some sense of why such strange mathematical models are needed. I enjoyed this book, but I wouldn't pretend to have understood it all on a first reading. However, I understood enough to be convinced that Hawking is not only one of our time's great scientists but also, despite his disabilities, one of science's great explainers. If you're at all interested in modern Physics, I recommend this book...
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Summary: If you really want to understand--this will disappoint
Review: The United States Tax Code is incredibly complex, hopelessly tangled, and the a notorius generator of coarse epithets. But it's all there. With patience, intelligence, and a willingness to read and re-read, you can work it out. You can't do that with Universe because it's not all there. It is as though Mr. Hawking's word processor had a "make it fit" key that did so by deleting every second paragraph and maybe a few random sentences to boot. The book is a beauty. Its illustrators should win a prize. It appears, however, Mr. Hawking never explained anything to them either, and they just decided to do their own thing to get paid...
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Summary: Avid Fan But Disapointed
Review: I am such and avid fan of Mr. Hawking, but I was perplexed and less than satisified with this book. His Brief History of Time seemed to convey all of the same concepts and was far more ground breaking. I guess I can give my kudos to the most intelligent theorist I have ever read and pony up the $[money] US for the book...but for the money his first book is far more intriguing. This book will just make a nice addition to the other text books that I prop up my coffee table with for a while and then move to the shelf then to the garage then to your coffee table. The main theroems discussed in the book are the deconstructivist approaches to physics that has been predominant in recent years, and how all arguement physical or not can eventually reveal their own simulation and render positivist theroems inexplicable. I found the layout poor because the copy is repeatedly interrupted by diagrams sidecopy and charts that are often times mis-positioned and distract from the purpose of the text without expanding your understanding of the subject. A similar and yet much more fun read can be found in almost anything by Baudrillard - they are both applyingthe same conceptual model one with numbers one with out.
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Summary: An ENJOYABLE book.
Review: This book can be said as a part 2 of 'A breif of time'. It is profusely illustrated and very enjoyable to read. The first chapter explains the development of relativity and from the second chapter onwards the development of theoritical physics between 1985 and present is explained. The illustrations are quite helpful in understanding the topic.
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