A Briefer History of Time: The Universe Explained

Now that awards season is over, it's time to unglue your eyes from movie screens and pick up a book. So I got a copy of Stephen Hawking's A Briefer History of Time because it was time I got around to it. The book was a perfect complement to my recently-concluded Introduction to Astronomy course on Coursera, but is well worth a read if you are a complete novice to the world of theoretical physics.

The book was published in 2005 as an update to A Brief History of Time, which came out in 1988. This version condenses some material and spends more time explaining the more intricate matters of quantum mechanics and string theory that prior readers found difficult to grasp. With the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle, I'm sure Hawking has plans for yet another update, but for now, this book serves as a marvelous introduction to the scientific concepts and theories that are increasingly being discussed in the media and popular culture.

A Briefer History of Time provides the history of physics and astronomy, introducing revolutionaries like Copernicus and Galileo who dared to suggest the earth moved around the sun, to Isaac Newton's discoveries about gravity, and the subsequent contributions of a man named Albert Einstein. After establishing the basic laws of physics and discussing our explosive origins via the big bang theory, the latter half of the book discusses the weird and wonderful topics of string theory, wormholes, time travel, the stuff of science fact and fiction. Are there multiple dimensions? Multiple universes? Can we bend space and time? The answer is, "Maybe, depends on who you ask." Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow have hit upon a writing style that is both concise and understandable, adjectives that can rarely be applied to any form of scientific writing. As a result, it is an incredibly quick read, but one that will leave you remarkably better-informed about the world you live in.

Theoretical physics sounds like the province of geniuses and intellectual giants, and it often is, but a basic understanding of it can be achieved by any layman. And in our increasingly science and technology-dominated world, it makes sense to consider what people are doing in their laboratories and whether those scientists at CERN are really going to kill us all with their Large Hadron Collider experiments. If nothing else, reading A Briefer History of Time might help you understand the science jargon that Sheldon Cooper spouts on The Big Bang Theory every week, or Spock's musings in the next Star Trek movie. Physics isn't just for physicists anymore.