Advertisement

A Brief History of Time

The movie about Stephen Hawking’s ideas from his book titled the same and abut his life. A Brief History of Time attempts to explain a range of subjects in cosmology, including the Big Bang, black holes, light cones and superstring theory, to the nonspecialist reader. Its main goal is to give an overview of the subject but, unusual for a popular science book, it also attempts to explain some complex mathematics.

The author notes that an editor warned him that for every equation in the book the readership would be halved, hence it includes only a single equation: E = mc². In addition to Hawking’s abstinence from equations, the book also simplifies matters by means of illustrations throughout the text, depicting complex models and diagrams.

The book is considered by many to be an “unread bestseller”, which is a book many people own but few have finished.

I really do like the idea to address such an exciting subject to non mathematicians. The choice of topics is well balanced and gives you an interesting introduction into the modern view of our universe. In particular the introduction of sometimes contradictory models explain how physics works the evolution of ideas.

Join The Conversation

11 Comments / User Reviews

Leave Your Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  1. Steven’s the man!

  2. Steven’s the man!

  3. I like the book better 🙂

    • Warning – the above is a fake comment used to mask a link to a fraudulent website .. they take payment but do not deliver any service.

  4. That makes sense to me but does this?
    Assassins do it from behind. 🙂

  5. Ive read the book and was curious about this movie. sadly the sound quality made me think otherwise

    • Yeah – they couldn’t even get a real voice-over artist to do the narration – sounds like they used some speech synthesizer from the 1980’s.

      • I totally agree. It was just an awful idea to use the robotic voice – as authentic to Stephen Hawking as it may be – as the narration. There’s no reason they couldn’t have put a “For the convenience of the viewer, Dr. Hawking’s words are spoken by an actor” disclaimer at the beginning… I’ve seen other Docs do it.

      • I do hope you realize that this is what Mr. Hawking’s speech box sounds like, or that the internet is an amazingly poor medium for conveying sarcasm lol.