A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking's ‘A Brief History of Time* has become an international publishing phenomenon. Translated into thirty languages, it has sold over ten million copies worldwide and lives on as a science book that continues to captivate and inspire new readers each year. When it was first published in 1988 the ideas discussed in it were at the cutting edge of what was then known about the universe. In the intervening twenty years there have been extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and macro-cosmic world. Indeed, during that time cosmology and the theoretical sciences have entered a new golden age. Professor Hawking is one of the major scientists and thinkers to have contributed to this renaissance.
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181mentions
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45% recommend50% neutral5% critical
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What Hacker News says
- Physics was like that as well, and from my limited experience chemistry too.
The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read.
Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy.
One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it.
Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.
- As an early teen I begged my parents for both A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design. Read both several times. ~15 years later, my parents are still holding on to them and my Dad has read them a couple of times too. It was great reading and played a significant role in my choice of research as a career.
Never heard of the "people don't actually read it" meme.
- I feel like what's interesting to the technically minded will stay evergreen? (You mentioned Neuromancer for example)
"A Brief History of Time" was one of my favorite books as a pre-teen beginning to wonder how the world works.
On the fiction side I've heard good things about Cory Doctorow's works -- I purchased a copy of "Little Brother" a while back and enjoyed it. Maybe not as high literature as 1984 or Catch 22 but it was engaging and if I had kids I'd gift it to them when they were the right age.
- I love that theory. I very much spent time thinking that it would be cool if we were inside a black hold after reading A Brief History of Time.
- That Fundamentals book by Wilczek that I mentioned is a good start. I'm also reading through the pop-sci classics now (A Brief History Of Time, Feynman's stuff) and they're not disappointing.
I really like the Very Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press. I've read 30 of them so far (just counted). At this point they basically have a book on every aspect of physics that has interested me at one time or another: black holes, gravity, quantum theory, waves, time, thermodynamics, chaos, etc. Really love being able to literally put the book in my back pocket and read a few pages whenever I have a spare moment. Each book can be very hit-or-miss, though. Some of them are badly written and fail at their basic value proposition (providing a concise and reasonably complete overview of a field).
- Take some time to read "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawkins. We know a lot more than you realize.
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