Has any one read this book by Stephen Hawkins? Is it any good?

I've read the Hawkins books including this one and its very interesting. I will admit some of the concepts are way over my head, but Hawkins does try to make the book understandable to the average person. Its includes some nice theories of how the universe may have been created even if many of the concepts like the String Theory were a bit confusing to me.

If you are interested in Cosmology its a must read.

Great book, and a great movie (too bad it's not available on DVD yet). I'd highly recommend the illustrated version, since the drawings help an awful lot in visualizing what he is talking about. I also think it's great that he wrote it for non-scientific people; I believe he originally wanted to have no mathematical formulas in the book, but eventually decided that he had to include E=MC2 (this may be covered in the introduction to the book). Fascinating stuff. The movie is much more about Stephen Hawking the man than it is about the content of the book, though.

Also excellent is his newest book, "The Universe in a Nutshell", as well as his PBS series (and companion book) "Stephen Hawking's Universe" (which, I believe, is available on DVD).

And it's "A Brief History OF Time", by the way.

I'd recommend this book as well.

I also highly recommend 'In Search of Schrodingers cat.' Its by John Gribbin, I try to re-read it every few years to see how much more (or less ) I understand.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...books&n=507846

I donno, it's always seemed to me to be a rather generic general-audence science book. You'd do just as well with something by Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, or Stephen Jay Gould.

I thought it was mediocre. Along the same lines and more compelling IMO are: Elegant Universe by Brian Greene; Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav; and The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

Um. "A Brief History OF Time"

Um. That's what berserker37 said.

"Um. That's what berserker37 said."

Sorry.

I read it a few times and it was good. Then I bought the unabridged audio tape, and it truly came alive. I have always preferred lecture to reading, but worried that for this type of subject I might get lost too easily and not be able to "go over something at my own pace" like you can with a book. That was not the case at all, and many things that I didn't truly understand while reading because clear while listening. Sometimes the brain works better under pressure, I suppose
( stupid brain)

I just wish it hadn't been read by the author

anyone who's read Universe in a Nutshell, I have a question. Hawking talks about how blackholes radiate, okay, all fine. but then he describes that eventually they'll lose mass and vanish and all the info will be lost or whatever. at some point, wouldnt they emit enough mass that they are no longer a black hole? they'll start radiating light and basically become a star/planet/quasar/whatever again?

A quick googling provided this site: http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/abholes.html

closest answer i could find from there is this:

Except for some peculiar circumstances, the evaporation of black holes by the Hawking Process doesn't remove the event horizon so our spacetime/universe never gets to see these naked singularities. Even if they did appear, they would not produce a new universe on top of our own because they are the wrong type of singularity because they are space-like not time-like as was the Big Bang.


so why doesnt it remove the event horizon. and it says it does sometimes, when it does, wouldnt the "naked singularity" no long be a singularity?