August 29, 1994
In 14 pieces, the author of A Brief History of Time examines astrophysics, current events and his own life.
August 30, 1993
British theoretical physicist Hawking ( A Brief History of Time ) here delivers a potpourri of lucid, succinct scientific articles and lectures and short autobiographical sketches. He speculates that spaceships or objects that fall into a black hole may go off into ``a little baby universe of their own,'' a small, self-contained world that branches off from our region of space-time. These baby universes, he adds, exist in imaginary time, ``at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end.'' In other pieces Hawking assesses physicists' search for a complete, unified ``theory of everything''; argues in favor of the tenet that people have free will; calls for large cuts in armaments; and describes his triumph over Lou Gehrig's disease, which has confined him to a wheelchair and forced him to communicate via a personal computer and speech synthesizer. In a concluding interview reprinted from the BBC, Hawking discusses his love of music and the role of intuition in his work.
September 1, 1993
Hawking is quite probably the most admired and recognizable figure in science today. His A Brief History of Time ( LJ 4/15/88) was a surprise best seller that stimulated a public fascination with this man who, although stricken with a debilitating neurological disease, is widely regarded as the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein. This new collection of essays and lectures will no doubt attract a large readership, but it is somewhat unbalanced. The biographical pieces are digressive and not particularly enlightening. Most pointless is the concluding piece, an interview in which Hawking expounds upon the eight records he would want if he were shipwrecked on a desert island. The scientific essays are much stronger and offer insight into a variety of cutting-edge issues in contemporary physics, though much of what is presented can be found in Brief History . Readers interested in Hawking's life are better advised to read John Gribbin and Michael White's Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science ( LJ 5/1/92). Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/93.-- Gregg Sapp, Montana State Univ. Libs., Bozeman
Copyright 1993 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 1, 1993
Last year saw the hawking of Hawking in the form of a biography by John Gribbin and Michael White, "Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science", and "a reader's companion to Hawking's Brief History of Time." Now we have a collection of 14 of the physicist's lectures and essays. Comercial considerations aside, this potpourri gives off the scent of black holes, hadrons, and imaginary time--a certain snare for the millions who bought Hawking's "Brief History," and maybe even for those who only recognize his name. Hawking's forums range from an amiably eccentric BBC program that asks intellectuals what music they would take to a desert island (Hawking would take the Beatles' "Please Please Me" and Mozart's "Requiem") to lecture halls filled with fellow physicists to what is perhaps his first writing for a general-interest publication, a 1977 issue of "Scientific American." The collection also contains several new sketches concerning his youth and his degenerative neural disease. Optimistic as always, both about his personal tribulations and about the theoretical chances of discovering a unified physical theory, Hawking again meets his own goal of showing us scientific plebians that we "are not shut out of the really big questions." ((Reviewed Aug. 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)