Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays ANNOTATION
The bestselling follow-up to Hawking's phenomenal million-copy hardcover bestseller A Brief History of Time is now available in trade paperback. These 14 pieces reveal Hawking variously as the scientist, the man, the concerned world citizen, and--always--the rigorous and imaginative thinker.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In his phenomenal bestseller A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking literally transformed the way we think about physics, the universe, reality itself. Widely regarded as the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein, he has opened our minds to today's most important scientific ideas about the cosmos. Now Stephen Hawking returns to shed new light on the darkest regions of space and time...and to reveal an extraordinary array of possibilities for our understanding of the universe. These thirteen essays and one remarkable extended interview broadcast over the BBC on Christmas day 1992 range from the autobiographical to the purely scientific. Building on his earlier work, Stephen Hawking discusses imaginary time, how black holes can give birth to baby universes, and scientists' efforts to find a complete unified theory that would predict everything in the universe, a concept that he believes will come to seem as natural to the next generation as the idea that the world is round. With the great unfolding mysteries of the universe as a backdrop, Stephen Hawking also reflects on free will, the value of life, and his perceptions of death. He looks at how science theory converges with - and diverges from - science fiction, as well as how science fact interfaces with our own lives. The pieces in this collection reveal Stephen Hawking variously as the scientist, the concerned world citizen, the man, and - always - the rigorous and imaginative thinker. Severely disabled by ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease - he describes the way in which this has affected but not constrained his personal and intellectual life: from the special computer technology that lets him translate his thoughts into words and his words into sounds, enabling him to write and speak, to the process of evolving his ideas, teaching his students, and working with his colleagues. Using his characteristic mastery of language, his sense of humor, his commitment to plain speaking, and his disdain for pomp
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
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. (Sept.)
Library Journal
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
Booknews
The superstar science popularizer offers a collection of 14 essays, written 1976-92, and the text of a BBC interview. He discusses his own life, the philosophy of science, the excitement he finds in science, and other topics. No bibliography. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Kirkus Reviews
Superstar physicist Hawking—whose A Brief History of Time (1988) is ensconsed in the Guinness Book of Records for having had the longest bestseller-run in English-language history—returns with 11 essays and one interview, covering matters autobiographical, scientific, and philosophical. The autobiographical pieces share a sketchy, conversational tone and drop a few tasty nuggets: Hawking didn't learn to read until he was eight and proved to be (in the Einstein tradition) a mediocre student; if dropped on a desert island, he would listen to Mozart's Requiem and read Middlemarch. But even so, these pieces keep Hawking's inner life strictly under wraps. Most of the other essays, which tend to repeat themselves, cover the author's major scientific insights: that the universe is "neither created nor destroyed"; that space/time began 15 billion years ago and is finite but boundless, like the surface of a globe. Hawking cites as his "most surprising discovery" the realization that black holes are not self-enclosed but leak particles and radiation: This leads directly to his most recent enthusiasm, "baby universes," generated by black holes, which branch off from our own universe and sometimes return to it. Sometimes the going is thick ("the N=8 theory has twenty-eight spin-1 particles"), but most of Hawking's arguments will be clear to educated laypeople. His weak suit is philosophy, and, indeed, he includes a mild-mannered attack on professional philosophers, many of whom find his discussions of the big questions—what is creation? does God exist?—to be, as he puts it, "naive and simple-minded." No matter: Hawking will be remembered for his physics, not hismetaphysics. Not much new, but people feel smarter just by buying a Hawking book. This will sell.
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