Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking - Book Review

With characteristic wit, Professor Stephen Hawking writes in the Foreword to The Universe In A Nutshell (2001): "I hadn't expected my popular book, A Brief History of Time, to be such a success... After that, people kept asking when I would write a sequel. I resisted because I didn't want to write Son of Brief History or A Slightly Longer History of Time..." The first book was so successful it inspired others such as David Filkin's Stephen Hawking's Universe: The Cosmos Explained (1998), another nice work.

Hawking's book is excellent for the general reader, amateur scientist, or professional from a different field of science. It is reminiscent of Carl Sagan's books Cosmos (1980) and Pale Blue Dot (1996) in the way pictures are generously used to explain difficult concepts, like the big bang and Richard Feynman's theory of multiple histories.

Hawking begins by explaining Einstein's theory of relativity, a notoriously complex subject. "Einstein's postulate that the laws of nature should appear the same to all freely moving observers was the foundation of the theory of relativity, so called because it implied that only relative motion was important. Its beauty and simplicity convinced many thinkers, but there remained a lot of opposition. Einstein had overthrown two of the absolutes of nineteenth-century science: absolute rest, as represented by the ether, and absolute or universal time that all clocks would measure. Many people found this an unsettling concept... (I still get two or three letters a week telling me Einstein was wrong.) Nevertheless, the theory of relativity is now completely accepted by the scientific community, and its predictions have been verified in countless applications."

Spacetime, the twins paradox, and time dilation are explained through well done pictures.

One mild criticism can be directed at an illustration of a red hot planet Earth with shoulder to shoulder people. The caption reads, "By the year 2600 the world's population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot." While this projection may be technically sound, it ignores some important facts in painting a dire picture. Presuming hypothetically that the Earth is warming, the projection ignores prospects like technologies for cooling the planet from space, an ocean of water in Europa that contains over twice the water of Earth, and the possibility of human migration to space. The problem with painting such a pessimistic picture is that it risks an overreaction by world leaders.

Still, Hawking's book succeeds where others fail. No books have matched this one in general science since its publication. It is a must read, especially for people who like astronomy and physics.