Review: A Brief History of Time
With hundreds of physics/cosmology books out there you most feel overwhelm specially if you're new to the field and just want to learn the basics. You probably don't want to waste your money or even worse your time on a 300 or 400 page book that you don't understand, luckily for you I've already taken one for the team and went ahead and read the book. Here I give you a short to the point review of in my opinion one of the best, if not the best cosmology book for beginners or non-experts:
For people that may not know Stephen Hawking, was the Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge for 30 years made famous by the "Hawking Radition" which he talks about in the book. He died on march 18, 2018 from a disease called Lou Gehrig's disease which he battled from a young age. This is the exact copy that I own which is the updated edition released in 2017, it includes a new foreword written by Hawking himself that was not included in the original edition published in 1988 in the US. It also includes an updated appendix that acknowledges the many advances in the understanding of the universe and its beginning, for example the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO in 2015-2016. Other than that the rest of the book remains the same. The book starts off by depicting how most scientist and regular people viewed the universe, at least back in the 80s. This gives you a great introduction and the basic knowlegde you'll need to understand the themes he'll talk about in the rest of the book. Throughout the book you get simple explanations and great real life examples that help you digest the complicated topics at hand, it even has a surprising amount of humor giving us a glipse at Hawking's comedic genius. Overall the book is short with only 226 pages which took me about a month to finish( had a busy schedule), it is a solid first entry if your looking to dive into the world of theoretical physics and cosmology. I will highly recommend it, final score 9/10.
I'll leave a link down below where you can go on amazon and buy the book, you can get it in different formats like; kindle, audiobook( you can get it for free with an audible trial), original 1988 hardcover and this version. I'll also link you to Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Death by Black Hole And Other Comic Quandaries which would be a great second option, if you want a review on this one let me know on the comment section below. Hopefully this review was helpful.
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