Hawking's Brief History of Time 1990 -- still worth reading?

I inherited a copy of a 1990 paperback of Hawking's book. By far I read more fiction and history than science (including popular science). I have often seen this book mentioned. For a decided nonspecialist, is this still by and large worth reading, or is it seriously outdated enough that I might as well not bother?

That's one I've never gotten around to reading, but I imagine the only parts that are likely to be outdated are the bits about the fate of the universe. Measurements of the density of the universe weren't all that precise at that point, and dark energy hadn't been discovered yet.

Oh, also, that book is probably where he uses an unfortunately misleading analogy to explain what's going on with Hawking radiation. A lot's been written about better ways to understand Hawking radiation, which you can probably find just by googling that.

Ori Vandewalle said:

That's one I've never gotten around to reading, but I imagine the only parts that are likely to be outdated are the bits about the fate of the universe. Measurements of the density of the universe weren't all that precise at that point, and dark energy hadn't been discovered yet.

Oh, also, that book is probably where he uses an unfortunately misleading analogy to explain what's going on with Hawking radiation. A lot's been written about better ways to understand Hawking radiation, which you can probably find just by googling that.

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Although there is an awful lot of guesswork and conjecture involved. It's entirely possible that current thinking could come full circle back to Hawking's ideas.

You could almost write a book on the 'discovery' of dark of dark matter; a substance that has not been analysed or seen, but (supposedly) makes up most of the known universe. It seems like it is being used as a convenient excuse to explain everything that doesn't make sense. Like a modern equivalent of map-maker's 'here be dragons'.

I have the hard covered Illustrated A Brief History of Time The Universe in the a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking It's a really handsome book and looks great on my shelf . iv'e thumb through and read a page two from time to time . But, it leaves me with a very serious question of " Can the Universe actually fit into a nutshell ? The world may never know.

paranoid marvin said:

Although there is an awful lot of guesswork and conjecture involved. It's entirely possible that current thinking could come full circle back to Hawking's ideas.

You could almost write a book on the 'discovery' of dark of dark matter; a substance that has not been analysed or seen, but (supposedly) makes up most of the known universe. It seems like it is being used as a convenient excuse to explain everything that doesn't make sense. Like a modern equivalent of map-maker's 'here be dragons'.

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Oh, sorry, I think maybe my post implied there was something incorrect about Hawking's science in the book, but that's not what I meant. I think the consensus is that Hawking radiation is definitely real and works the way he described it mathematically, but that the analogy he uses to explain it to a lay audience (virtual particle pairs popping into existence at a black hole event horizon and only one of them escaping) is not good.

As far as dark stuff, there's a distinction between dark matter and dark energy. Dark energy is a name for an observed effect--the recent acceleration of the expansion of the universe implied by supernovae standard candles. This acceleration is easily modeled just by, essentially, adding a constant term (a cosmological constant, if you will) to Einstein's field equations for general relativity, which has units of energy(-ish). Why that term should be there and what it means is anybody's guess at this point, but you have to start somewhere.

Dark matter is an entirely different beast, originally just formulated as something we can't see that's messing with galaxy rotation curves. There's a lot else it also happens to explain, which I think is actually what you want rather than something which doesn't seem to fit into the rest of the picture. But yeah, no particles found so far, which is discouraging, and figuring out exactly how much of it is needed and what properties it should have has led to some messiness. I don't think this is bad, though. I think this is just what the sometimes haphazard, stumbling guesswork of science looks like, and we only happen to notice it with dark matter because astronomy/cosmology is the flashy science that makes the news.

I tried to read it, didn't get very far. It got donated