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

Extollager

Extollager

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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 For a decided nonspecialist, is this still by and large worth reading, or is it seriously outdated enough that I might as well not bother?
 
That's one I've never gotten around to reading, but I imagine the only parts that are likely to be outdated are the bits about the fate of the universe.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That's one I've never gotten around to reading, but I imagine the only parts that are likely to be outdated are the bits about the fate of the universe.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 ? :unsure: The world may never know.:(
 
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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.
 
Extollager said:
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?
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Hawking's book has a focus on black holes and time, and I don't believe these ideas have significantly changed since publication. Sure, we've learned more about black holes since then and even taken pictures of them, but aside from quibbles over minor details it's a book that remains very much on point.

Hawking was very much the pioneer of black hole theory, so he established the fundamentals for our understanding of them and that's what this book is partly about - and later discoveries are more about fleshing out his ideas than contradicting them.

As for cosmology, we've since had ideas such as dark matter and dark energy added to it, but again Hawking focuses on the fundamentals, and I don't believe these have broadly changed since the book was published.

Perhaps surprisingly, it's a very readable book - probably why it was so successful - and well worth taking a look at.

Hope that helps. :)
 
I'm probably not the right person to give an opinion on this book - I have a PhD in physics and, to be frank, I generally don't read many pop physics books; if it ain't got mathematics (and most of them don't have more than a couple of incredibly simple equations. Usually E=mc^2!) you're unlikely to really learn much about the subject IMO. (You essentially get a lot of 'Trust me Bro, I've calculated that this idea is right.')

However I do remembering reading this book in 1989, as I was doing my undergraduate. So from those dim and distant memories, I'd say the first three quarters of the book was really just undergraduate physics and pretty standard stuff for most pop physics (I have read what feels like a lifetime of New Scientist* and aBHoT was at a level of physics article from there). The final quarter went into more advanced areas related to his ideas...but I disliked the groping about trying to explain this more technical information. So I found it a bit of a struggle, knowing a bit about what he was trying to describe but feeling hampered by the relatively clumsy and wordy way it was put down. Really could do with some math meat in it :ROFLMAO:

But as I said, I'm probably not the target audience for this book. As others have stated there is probably nothing too wrong with the info and ideas in the book but I'd guess there are a lot of concepts that are at the forefront of cosmology now that weren't even known when this was written. Things like the Holographic universe, the problems and numerous solutions related to paradox of black hole evaporation, multiverse speculations etc.

I'd go back and read it again, to see if my 30 year old memory is correct...but I can't remember where the book is;). Probably up in a box in the attic!

=============

* I'd say that the 'old' New Scientist was much better than the current rag. I don't buy the magazine any more, but have picked it up once in a blue moon and since they were sold off to new publishers they've definitely gone much 'lighter' and much more 'pop'.
 
I can grasp the concepts of Physics but not the mathematics that are involved . I was really bad at math . I only got a c + in algebra .:(
 
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Stephen Palmer said:
Certainly still worth reading. Iirc there's one mistake in it, where Hawking suggested time would go backwards if the universe halted its expansion and began shrinking.
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Every time I hear the whole reverse time notion these are what pop into my head. :)

1. The Counter Clock World by Phillip K Dick
2. Cryptozoic by Brian Aldiss
3. Bearing and Hourglass by Piers Anthony
4. The Counter Clock Incident an episode from the Star Trek he animated series
5, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button story by F Scott FitzGerald and the film with Brad Pitt
6. Merlin the magician who supposedly lived backwards in time

The very concept or a reverse universe or person aging backwards in time or living backwards in time is the stuff of fiction.

If for example there was an anti matter parallel universe mirror of our own. Im thinking it would be indistinguishable from out own , The laws of physics would be the same and time would flow in the same direction. The only difference is that universe would be made of oppositely charged antimatter . And being antimatter , we obviously couldn't ' go there like the crew of the Enterprise did .:)
 
Venusian Broon said:
* I'd say that the 'old' New Scientist was much better than the current rag. I don't buy the magazine any more, but have picked it up once in a blue moon and since they were sold off to new publishers they've definitely gone much 'lighter' and much more 'pop'.
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Oh I so agree with you here. I still get it on subscription for the news section and occasionally they have some interesting articles but half the time the articles are something and nothing. There will be a big headline along the lines of have the laws of physics been broken? followed by a lot of waffle and the conclusion not really. A few veer close to new age stuff and take big leaps from small study samples. Even so it does give me some good bits of inspiration for Sci-Fi scenarios
 
BAYLOR said:
Every time I hear the whole reverse time notion these are what pop into my head. :)

1. The Counter Clock World by Phillip K Dick
2. Cryptozoic by Brian Aldiss
3. Bearing and Hourglass by Piers Anthony
4. The Counter Clock Incident an episode from the Star Trek he animated series
5, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button story by F Scott FitzGerald and the film with Brad Pitt
6. Merlin the magician who supposedly lived backwards in time

The very concept or a reverse universe or person aging backwards in time or living backwards in time is the stuff of fiction.

If for example there was an anti matter parallel universe mirror of our own. Im thinking it would be indistinguishable from out own , The laws of physics would be the same and time would flow in the same direction. The only difference is that universe would be made of oppositely charged antimatter . And being antimatter , we obviously couldn't ' go there like the crew of the Enterprise did .:)
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And TIme's Arrow by Martin Amis
 
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