★★☆☆☆ Mediocre-to-poor physics popularization

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking

As a physicist, Stephen Hawking had two major accomplishments. First, he did a preliminary calculation that suggested that the formation of a black hole might be inevitable when a big enough star burned out and collapsed. Roger Penrose confirmed this suggestion and put it on a rigorous mathematical basis. Later, Hawking did a similar favor for Jacob Bekenstein. Bekenstein suggested that black holes have entropy. This, as Bekenstein (and every other physicist) understood, implied that a black hole must emit light, which contradicts the name! Hawking thought Bekenstein's idea was nonsense and set out to prove him wrong. To his credit, he proved that Bekenstein was right, putting Bekenstein's speculation on a firm basis.

As a result of these accomplishments Hawking became the world's most famous living physicist, a position he held for ten-twenty years. During that time he was the go-to example of a genius scientist -- the one name most people would pull out of a hat when asked to name a scientific genius. In 1988, at the height of his fame, he published a popular physics book, A Brief History of Time. Ten years later he published an updated version. I read the first version shortly after it came out, and in 2012 I read the updated version.

A Brief History of Time is not a good book. At least it is not a good book if you value a book by the experience of reading it. It is a good book to put on your bookshelf where visitors can see it and be impressed. Most of the people I know who read A Brief History of Time and remarked on it said roughly the same thing. "He's a genius! I didn't understand a word of the book, but he's obviously a genius!"

This is wrong, wrong, WRONG, wrongity wrong. Writing incomprehensibly about a difficult subject is not a sign of genius, but the opposite. Anyone can write incomprehensibly. The sign of genius is to write so clearly about a difficult subject that anyone can understand it. It's not easy, but it's not impossible. Einstein did it, Richard Feynman did it, and Steven Weinberg did it. Leonard Susskind and Sean Carroll are doing it.

My experience of A Brief History of Time was roughly the opposite of that of my friends. I am well informed on fundamental physics. (It helps that I am a card-carrying mathematician.) I was disappointed at how little in A Brief History of Time was new to me. It was almost all well-known established physics, with no extraordinary insight.

Hawking was a good physicist, but he was not a good physics writer. I would not advise anyone to read A Brief History of Time. It is a waste of your time (although, since it is indeed brief, less of a waste than, say Reality is Not What it Seems). If you want a really deep, insightful, and challenging exposition of the physics of time, try Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here.

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