The Illustrated Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded Edition
Nonfiction
By Stephen William Hawking
Reviewed by Ted Deuel
Rated 5 out of 5 Stars
Stephen Hawking is an established scientific genius, but this book establishes him as a brilliant writer. While men of ancient times could easily understand the latest scientific ideas, people today are lost. Enter A B
rief History of Time. This book helps fill in that gap between an average person’s understanding and the highly specialized scientists’ knowledge.
This book covers ideas that are profound and affect everyone. It explains theories that concern the creation of the universe, time travel, light-speed travel, and many more topics. Imagine actually having some grasp of Einstein’s general relativity. Ever heard of string theory? Time travel a possibility? What are black holes? This book packs an incredible amount of information into an incredibly small amount of pages, yet somehow is still easily read – this is the true marvel of this book. The illustrated version contains many updates and additions throughout this book. Every concept throughout the book is accompanied by at least one illustration. The analogies he uses are hardly original, but long-standing ones that have withstood the test of time, and they serve him well. Towards the middle of the book, some of the concepts get more complex. However the average person can understand about 90% of this book and those parts are the most interesting! It will change the way you look at the universe.
He isn’t just writing for the Scientific American crowd, but for the Parade crowd and the People crowd. This is populist science. This book is an excellent introduction to cutting edge research in cosmology, relativity, the big bang, and anything else you might have scratched your head about! “The best physics’ book I’ve ever read. Simple, concise, practical for non-experienced, regular, curios, people.” says Richard Z. Loza, reader of the book, I agree.
