Customer Reviews

The Universe in a Nutshell

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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.

Stephen Hawking attempts to answer, for the second time, the question "can the world's most brilliant physicist explain the most complex issues of physics to the average layperson?" The answer is, once again, "well...sort of". I must immediately separate my criticism of the book from any perceived criticism of the man. Dr. Hawking's intellect is immense, and his accomplishments are all the more astonishing considering his physical impairment. However, expertise in a given area does not automatically confer the status of "great teacher". In fact, it is not uncommon for world class experts to be less than world class in the art of teaching and explaining their areas of expertise. Alas, this is my summation of Dr. Hawking's latest effort. I thought for some time that any book on such a difficult subject must of necessity consist of significant compromises; mere mortals cannot hope to understand cutting edge physics. I thought this until I read "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene (Random House 1999). Dr. Greene's intellect no doubt cannot compare to Dr. Hawking's, however he has an uncanny ability to teach and explain the most difficult subjects. With an absolute minimum amount of illustration, he anticipates the reader's questions and offers a clear and concise explanation. Dr. Hawking's tome, on the other hand, covers much the same material but is much less accessible. The book reads like a "USA Today", with annoying explanatory vignettes and illustrations on almost every page, making for a very disjointed reading. One can almost hear the publisher saying " Steve - baby - they crucified us when the first book had no illustrations. We need to punch this one up with color charts and graphs!". And punch it up they did - ad nauseum. The resulting book is, in many respects, a triumph of form over substance. Do not misunderstand: Stephen Hawking is a very good teacher, he is simply far from the best. His efforts, I might suggest, would benefit immensely by a change of editors. Do I recommend this book? Absolutely! We live in wonderful times when, for a few dollars, we can gain access to one of the most brilliant intellects of our time. I will gladly buy anything Stephen Hawking writes and consider myself priviledged to do so.

Stephen Hawking occupies the Lucasian chair at the University of Cambridge, which was once held by Isaac Newton before its motorization as Hawking writes humorously. Hawking is also regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Albert Einstein. His previous book, "A Brief History of Time," was sold an estimated 25 million copies world over, but was notorious for mostly not being read beyond the earliest chapters. "The Universe in a Nutshell" is a sequel to it, including many illustrations and telling in a more readable style about the major breakthroughs that have occurred in the field of theoretical physics after the release of the first book.

The author writes in the foreword that the structure of the book is like a tree, the first two chapters forming a central trunk from which the other chapters branch off. Thus, after reading two introductory chapters on the theory of relativity and "the shape of time," the reader can jump to any of later five chapters on the development of the universe, black holes, the possibility or impossibility of time travel, our future, and the future journey of discovery.

Many scientists tried to avoid addressing a question about the beginning of the universe. In chapter 3, however, Hawking states the necessity of trying to understand it on the basis of science for the following reason: If the laws of science are suspended at the beginning of the universe, they might fail also at other times.

The universe is considered to have begun in a big bang, a point where the whole universe was scrunched up into a single point of infinite density. At this point Einstein's general theory of relativity cannot be used, because when the universe is small the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics is important. Therefore, we need a "quantum theory of gravity," a unified theory of the general theory of relativity and the quantum mechanics, and this is the main subject of the book.

Hawking's own approach to the unified theory is to combine the general theory of relativity and Richard Feynman's idea of multiple histories. Many related concepts and theories, for example, holography, duality, p-branes, M-theory and superstring theory, are explained. Only in chapter 6, the story is rather close to our life, and here the author describes also excitingly how biological and electronic life will go on developing in complexity at an ever-increasing rate.

I highly recommend this book to laypersons. They will possibly get only a feeling of understanding, not understanding itself; but the book surely opens their eyes more or less about the principles of the universe already found and those on the way to be found. Physical scientists outside Hawking's field might get some frustrations, because advanced concepts at the forefront of research are not conveyed well enough by the everyday language without the aid of the mathematical language suitable for physics.

Earlier attempts to formulate an answer that takes into account existing theories and observations have failed because of obstacles posed by gravity. The Nature of Space and Time pitts two heavy weights trying to provide a loop quantum gravitational model that successfully merges current ideas, and which may enable us to overcome such difficulties. Stephen Hawking shot to fame in the world of physics when he provided a mathematical proof for the Big Bang theory. This theory showed that the entire universe exploded from a singularity, an infinitely small point with infinite density and infinite gravity. Hawking was able to come to his proof using mathematical techniques that had been developed by Roger Penrose. These techniques were however developed to deal not with the beginning of the Universe but with black holes.

Science had long predicted that if a sufficiently large star collapsed at the end of its life, all the matter left in the star would be crushed into an infinitely small point with infinite gravity and infinite density...a singularity. Hawking realized that the Universe was, in effect, a black hole in reverse. Instead of matter being crushed into a singularity, the Universe began when a singularity expanded to form everything we see around us today, from stars to planets to people. Hawking realized that to come to a complete understanding of the Universe he would have to unravel the mysteries of the black hole.

Hawking and his fellow physicists embarked on an extraordinary intellectual expedition to tame the black hole. Slowly physicists were coming to understand this most destructive force of nature. But Hawking realized that there was something missing from the emerging picture. All work on black holes to that point used the physics of the large-scale Universe, the physics of gravity first developed by Newton and then refined by Einstein's theories of general and special relativity. Hawking realized that to come to a full understanding of black holes, physicists would also have to use the physics of the small-scale Universe, (the physics that had been developed to explain the movements of atoms and sub-atomic particles, known as quantum mechanics.) The problem was that no one had ever combined these two areas of physics before. But that didn't deter Hawking. He set about developing a new way to force the physics of quantum mechanics to co-exist with Einstein's relativity within the intense gravity of a black hole.

After months of work Hawking came up with a remarkable result. His equations were showing him that something was coming out of the black hole. This was supposed to be impossible. The one thing that everyone thought they knew about black holes was that things went in but nothing, not even light itself, could escape. But the more Hawking checked, the more he was convinced he was right. He could see radiation coming out of the black hole. Hawking then realized that this radiation (Hawking Radiation) would cause the black hole to evaporate and eventually disappear. Although Hawking's theories about black hole evaporation were revolutionary, they soon came to be widely accepted. But Hawking knew that this work had far more fundamental consequences. In 1976 he published a paper called 'The Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse'. In it he argued that it wasn't just the black hole that disappeared. All the information about everything that had ever been inside the black hole disappeared too.

There are limits to what science can know. For many years no one took much notice of Hawking's ideas until a fateful meeting in San Francisco. Hawking presented his ideas to some of the world's leading physicists. In the audience were Gerad t'Hooft and Leonard Susskind, two leading particle physicists. They were shocked. Both realized that Hawking's 'breakdown of predictability' applied not only to black holes but to all processes in physics. According to Susskind, if Hawking's ideas were correct then it would infect all physics, there would no longer be any direct link between cause and effect. Physics would become impotent. Since that meeting arguments effectively boiled down into two camps. On the one side were Susskind and those who believed that Hawking was wrong: information could not be lost. On the other were Hawking and those who believed that physics would have to be rewritten to take into account the uncertainty about information that Hawking had uncovered. Until a paper emerged by a young mathematician Juan Maldacena. It claimed to be a rigorous mathematical explanation of what happened to information in black holes. It showed that information was not lost. Hawking, it seemed, was on the losing side. But he was not convinced. Hawking set to work with a young research student, Christophe Galfard, to try to pick apart the Maldacena paper. They thought they could use the same mathematical techniques employed by Maldacena to prove that information was in fact lost. But after two years they still could not prove their thesis.

Hawking was soon back at work, working on a new proof for the information paradox. But he was to defend his long held belief that information was lost in black holes, instead he claimed that he could now prove the opposite. Hawking presented the outline of proof that he hoped would at last solve the problem that he had posed almost 30 years earlier. But despite the bold claims, some physicists remain unconvinced. Over a year has passed and he has still not presented a fully worked mathematical proof to back up his ideas. But Hawking is a stubborn man. If Hawking is going to change his mind on a view he held for almost 30 years then it will be with his own proof, in his own time. In spite of failing health and increasing problems communicating with his colleagues, he is still working on the proof. If he succeeds in completing a proof that convinces his colleagues, he will not only have solved one of the most difficult problems in physics but he will have managed to have produced ground breaking work at the very end of his career. A feat that even his hero Einstein could not accomplish. If not, Hawking will have inspired some future physicist, who will eventually complete the paradox and answer the question 'What happened before The Big Bang?'

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Stephen Hawking's book, THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL, succeeds in making some of the newest theories in physics understandable to everyday people. Until reading this book, I hadn't considered what conditions would be necessary in order for our night-time sky to look completely white with stars, nor had I seen such a gorgeous depiction of the micro and macro-cosmic universe in a nutshell (cover illustration). Hawking carefully examines time-travel, predicting the future, and the shape of time after starting the book with an overview of the theory of relativity. Hawking saves his biggest question for last, to leave readers wondering "Do we live on a brane, or are we just holograms?" (A brane is something like a membrane.)

Thanks to stunning color illustrations and fascinating questions and ideas gracing almost every page, THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL accesses both the rational and intuitive hemispheres of the reader's brain. It's the perfect book to unwind with after a long day -- allowing the exotic images and ideas to percolate in your mind like a delicious cup of your favorite hot beverage -- opening your mind to whole new worlds of possibility.

Those seeking mathematical equations to accompany their theoretical physics will likely be disappointed by this coffee-table masterpiece, as will readers who prefer to read ground-breaking books which describe entirely new theories in physics. Pretty much everyone else will be thrilled to take a peek at the "big" questions and ideas being contemplated by the world's most famous physicist.

Have read many technical physics books and nearly all the preveiw books from Gamow's 123... to Greene's Elegant Universe. I found the first 4 chapters to be some of the best overview of modern physics ever written in so little space. Stephen must be commended on his work on this half of the book. He is not only able to present otherwise difficult subjects in a most appropriate manner for even the novice to enjoy and the physicist to admire. Within the first four chapters, his joining of the Quantum with Relativity and the treatment of time is an excellant account. He introduces "branes" appropriately and makes the work exciting. Bravo.

Hrrm. Now we come to Chapters 5, 6 and 7. These are simply too speculative with little physics. The bold statements in these chapters are not so much hard to accept on his simple explanation , but there are also provided with absolutely no foundation. And with such sweeping and typically backyard physics paradoxes being treated, this did more damage to my confusion on these matters.
He addressed the idea of killing your grandfather in the past and other such paradoxes. Argggh. Do we really have time to address these issues or have we run out of REAL physics problems. Basically, I think it would have ended better if Stephen had finished by trying to tie his vast solutions to problems in our everyday life. Enough of mystical physics, cannot we not treat it as a science again; and in the case of novices, as a means to clarify our local environment.

I know most science readers prefer the exotic, however, in providing introduction to novices is it not better to present physics as practical, meaningful and useful; rather than weird and off-the-wall.

A very good book. I'm impressed with how he explains theoretical concepts with the aid of diagrams (and with dry sense of humour). I have noticed this has been released in a single volume with his 'Brief History of Time'. This may be a better deal. A good starting point for readers interested in the subject.

It was a great read, Stephen Hawking explains theories with wit and clarity. He also uses pictures to help the reader better understand concepts. The book mainly explains general relativity, M-theory, quantum theory and other theories. If your looking for a physics book, this is the one.

Excellant read. Stephen Hawking's books are always a great academic challenge. You will not be disappointed!

Although the book isn't 100% layman, there are a number of revelations about our universe that have completely blown my mind. For instance, there are certain particles that exist that have to be rotated 720° before they are in their original starting position (as opposed to 360°)