★★☆☆☆ 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.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★☆☆ There was never going to be an HEA

Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan Michael G. Waltz I picked up Michael G. Waltz 's Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan because President-Elect Donald Trump nominated him for National Security Advisor. I saw that he had written this book and read it to get an idea of who he is. First lesson: Waltz is not a buffoon like Matt Gaetz or Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Not a buffoon" is a low bar, but with this administration a nominee who clears it is welcome. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Waltz is an intelligent man with serious experience relevant to the post of National Security. If you are more than 30 years old, you have probably had this experience. You know a couple -- perhaps one of them is a friend of yours. Their relationship is always on the rocks. They fight, and the fights are serious. Because you're outside the relationship, you can see what neither of the principals

★★★★☆ Fictional autobiography of Rome's fourth Emperor

I, Claudius Robert Graves Robert Graves 's I, Claudius begins with these words I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus this-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as ‘Claudius the Idiot’, or ‘That Claudius’, or ‘Claudius the Stammerer’, or ‘Clau-Clau-Claudius’, or at best as ‘Poor Uncle Claudius’, am now about to write this strange history of my life... It is ostensibly an autobiography written by Claudius himself, covering the years of his life until he suddenly and unexpectedly became Emperor of Rome. (The sequel, Claudius the God continues the story into his reign.) Claudius is an intelligent and, given his environment and predecessors, surprisingly decent and humble man. Of course, the reader never forgets that we have only Claudius's own word for who and what he is. But his intelligence is beyond doubt -- a fool could not have written this. P

★★★☆☆ Peggy Carter sans Steve Rogers

Agent Carter Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Marvel Near the end of Captain America: The First Avenger Steve Rogers dives his airplane into the sea in order to prevent it from reaching (and destroying) New York City. In a final radio conversation with Agent Peggy Carter, he makes a date to take her dancing next Saturday. Both of them know he will not make that date. Agent Carter shows Peggy Carter's career after Steve's fall and after the end of the Second World War. The year is 1946, and she is an agent with the Strategic Scientific Reserve, a fictional secret organization that was the precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. It is, I suspect, more or less based on the OSS , which was more or less the precursor to the CIA. Although she is one of SSR's most experienced and effective operatives, having had experience in the SOE (a real English spy operation in World War II) before coming to the American side, Peggy is relegated to fetching coffee and answering phones by her bosses

★★★☆☆ Succession in Djelibeybi and other stuff

Pyramids Terry Pratchett Yesterday I finished listening to Terry Pratchett 's Pyramids (book 7 in his Discworld series, and I find myself doing what I usually do when I finish a Discworld novel: scrambling frantically to locate the plot. It's not that Pyramids lacks a plot. My problem is Pratchett 's everything-up-to-and-including-the-kitchen-sink approach to story-telling. The plot of Pyramids is surrounded my yards and yards of stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time. And indeed, most of those things were good ideas. I'm influenced by my background. I have written many scientific papers. My approach to writing a paper is to identify one main conclusion that I want to convince the reader of, then require that every sentence marshall evidence for or against that conclusion. Fiction is different, but not SO different as all that. The corresponding idea in fiction is that every sentence should advance the plot. Now, of course this is not a universal rul

★★★☆☆ Minimal surreal magic school story

Midnight for Charlie Bone Jenny Nimmo Charlie Bone has one friend, who has a dog. Charlie lives with his mother and two grandmothers, one who is kind (Maisie) and one, Grandma Bone, who is severe. Charlie discovers unexpectedly that he has a gift -- he is "endowed", as Grandma Bone says. When he looks at a photograph, he can hear the conversation that took place when it was taken. Grandma Bone tells him that, because he is endowed, he must go to a special private school, Bloor's Academy. Charlie accordingly goes to Bloor's Academy, meets other endowed children, and has adventures. Although this sounds like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson , the feeling is completely different. Jenny Nimmo 's style is spare to the point of minimalism. Nothing is described in more than the barest outline. I don't have a mental image of any of the characters. The story is told in the third person from Charlie's point of view. His inner dialog is minimal. I don't have a f

★★★☆☆ Informative but annoyingly tendentious

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues Jonathan Kennedy There is a book that everyone who is interested in biology and history should read: William H. McNeill 's Plagues and Peoples , published in 1976. I suppose that is long enough ago that we are allowed to call it a classic. Plagues and Peoples is an example of what I call a "I have a new hammer -- look at all these nails!" book. McNeill 's new hammer was consideration of the effects of infectious disease on history. He argued that infectious disease was an important force in history, persuasively in my opinion. Jonathan Kennedy 's Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues intends to update McNeill . Kennedy points out quite correctly that the advances in technology since 1976 enable us to see more deeply and clearly into the past of infectious disease than McNeill possibly could and thus to replace much of McNeill 's speculation with clearer and more solid answers. H

★★★★★ Cornelia Funke still gots it

Die Farbe der Rache Cornelia Funke I first listened to Cornelia Funke 's Inkworld trilogy (as it then was) beginning in 2004, and then as the audiobooks became available. They were among the very first audiobooks I ever listened to, and they were VERY good. The premise of the series is that some especially good narrators can, by reading a book aloud, read characters from the fictional world of the book into our own, and likewise read people from our world into the fictional world of the book. Versions of this idea are fairly common in fantasy fiction, and it's not hard to see why. If you are an avid reader, you feel that something like this happens when you read a good book: you enter into the book, and for a while you dwell in that fictional world. Aside from our own, the world in which most of the action of the Inkworld trilogy takes place is one created by a writer named Fenoglio in a fantasy novel called Inkheart . Although the series begins in our world, the principa

★★★★☆ Worst possible time to become a physician

Eleanore of Avignon Elizabeth DeLozier Elizabeth DeLozier 's Eleanore of Avignon is a story of the Black Death in Avignon, Provence, France. Even aside from the plague, there was a lot going on in Provence in 1348. It was that strange period in the history of the Roman Catholic Church when it was not literally Roman -- the popes lived in Avignon , not to be confused with the later even stranger period when there were simultaneously two guys claiming to be the pope. Clement VI was pope. His physician Guy de Chauliac (Guigo) would later became famous for an influential book on surgery, Chirurgia Magna . To make life even more exciting, the pregnant Queen Johanna of Naples arrived in Avignon while the plague was raging to be tried for the murder of one of her husbands. All of this really happened. In 1347 our hero, Eleanore Blanchet (an entirely fictional character), an herbalist and midwife living with her twin sister and father, runs into Guigo and manages to persuade

★★★★☆ If Virginia Hall was fictional, she would not be believable

A Woman of No Importance Sonia Purnell Fiction writers operate under certain constraints. Their characters and plots have to be believable. Pile the implausible too high, and critics and readers will complain. ( Mea culpa .) Reality is not thus constrained. Thus, Virginia Hall, an American spy, a tall striking redhead who speaks French with an American accent, and has a wooden leg that she calls Cuthbert, who organizes Resistance forces in occupied France during the Second World War, and who assembles and leads a force of about 1000 Maquis (rural guerillas) that defeat the Germans and drive them out of Le Puy before the Allied invasion reaches it. (Cuthbert seems so gratuitous. I would shout to the heavens about a fictional spy with a wooden leg. But Virginia was real, and she really had a wooden leg, and she really called it Cuthbert.) And this is only one of Hall's exploits. Before that she was the Limping Lady of Lyon and the Abwehr and Gestapo were obsessed with her, but never

★★★★☆ A broken mindship and lost children

In the Shadow of the Ship Aliette de Bodard Aliette de Bodard 's In the Shadow of the Ship is a novella set in her Xuya Universe . Like many Xuya stories, this one takes place aboard a mindship. This particular mindship is called Nightjar and was damaged escaping from the collapsing Empire. (Exactly which Empire this was I am not sure -- there is more than one in the Xuya Universe .) At any rate, Nightjar is not a healthy place. She escaped carrying some of her family. They still live aboard and afford her the loyalty she expects, mostly. Nightjar demands tribute in the form of children whom she lures into her dead zones, from which they never emerge. When Khuyên was a child she was invited to the dead zones by her cousin Anh, but she refused. Later she did the unthinkable: she left Nightjar for the broken Empire, where she rose to the post of Magistrate. Now Khuyên has returned to Nightjar for her grandmother's funeral, where she is met with a complex mixture of disdain

Search This Blog