From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In the 17 years since the publication of A Brief History of Time, Dr. Hawking's bestselling exposition of physics, new data from particle physics and observational astronomy have shed light on efforts to find a Grand Unified Theory of Everything that Hawking and Mlodinow use to enhance and update their answers to basic questions about the universe: where it's going and how it began. Discussed at length are the mysterious dark matter and dark energy-both of which can only be observed by their gravitational effects and are believed to make up 90 percent of the universe. Another area of research that has exploded in the past 20 years is string theory. Hawking and Mlodinow provide one of the most lucid discussions of this complex topic ever written for a general audience. Readers will come away with an excellent understanding of the apparent contradictions and conundrums at the forefront of contemporary physics. Recognizing that much of their audience will also be science fiction buffs, they include a chapter on the possibility of time travel. "Don't bet on it," the authors advise. Throughout these discussions, the authors maintain the same wry, lively tone that made the original Brief History such a delight. They close with a discussion of where physics ends and philosophy begins, "Why does the universe exist at all?" They cannot provide the answer, but they do provide an immense amount of food for thought. Highly recommended.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Theoretical physicist Hawking became an international celebrity thanks to his cosmological primer Brief History of Time (1988), one of the twentieth century's biggest best-sellers. According to Hawking, one copy of Brief History has been sold for every 750 people on earth (move over, Scarlett O'Hara!). While Brief History amassed that sales record, however, its subject matter didn't stand still, and some kind of overhaul, Hawking and Mlodinow say, came to seem necessary. They chose to revise in the direction of lesser length, more illustration, and greater accessibility as they updated to incorporate developments in string theory, new indications that a unified theory of physics--one that comprehends gravity as well as the three other physical forces--is possible, and new observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. Few will be sorry for their choice, for Briefer History may be the clearest introduction to physics ever, and not just because it eschews equations, though that helps. Its clarity arises from firmly adhering to the concept announced by the second chapter's title, "Our Evolving Picture of the Universe." The book is the developmental portrait--a biography, if you will--of the idea of a dynamic cosmos, which took long to catch on: even Einstein, whose relativity theories "broke" the idea as nothing before had done, clung to a cosmological constant (which, Hawking and Mlodinow show, yet has its uses) in the face of quantum mechanical indeterminacy. Like the best biographies, it's an utterly engrossing read. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
