This book shows the deep confusion in the current understanding of the cosmos. Entities like dark matter, dark energy, strings and many other oddities of modern science are discussed in one incomplete picture of the universe. Nature cannot be that whimsical and complicated. It has to be counterintuitive and simple in its basic terms. If you are looking for an elegant and complete picture of the universe then you may read Eugene Savov's Theory of Interaction the Simplest Explanation of Everything. Theory of interaction reveals the origin of the universe, space bodies and mind in terms of found patterns of unifying interaction.

When I say that this is a good book, i dont mean that it is a very exciting or easy to follow book. I mean that it is a book that serves its purpose by presenting a brief history of time to the reader. Certain chapters, however, are very interesting (at least, to me they are) but other chapters are very dry and require you to pay attention or else you will get lost and find yourself robotically skimming the lines.I recently graduated high school, so my education in chemistry and physics is rather limited and I found myself struggling to understand a few of the concepts. Yet I did manage to learn quite a lot from this book and in a few years I will probably read it again and learn even more. So it's probably worth the investment, and worth reading, but dont expect it to be a big page turner.

I greatly enjoyed this newer edition of Hawking's classic, and was impressed with how clear the writing was. The illustrations were beautiful as well. The sections on Aristotle, Newton, and the expanding universe were breathtaking.However, the explanations of string theory and Richard Feynman's theories of particles and antiparticles were a bit murky for the layperson and needed more explanation.While admirable, Hawking's attempt to find a "unified theory of everything" strikes me as a bit arrogant and absurd, especially as science and philosophy are both becoming much more specialized. As Hawking notes, Wittgenstein, reduced philosophy to mere questions of language. Yes, I know, they poo-poohed man's attempts to fly and to land a man on the moon, but Hawking's desire, though admirable, to know "the mind of God" through a unified theory of science seems silly.Why can't we, as Iris Dement says, "let the mystery be"?

This book tackles the difficult task of trying to synthesize all that is known about physics into something that can be read on the beach. While it does this surprisingly well (at the expense of any in-depth discussions of any of the topics), there was an error in something very minor that tainted my ability to appreciate the book overall -- because in the back of my mind I kept thinking if something so minor was incorrect, what about the major statements?The problem? While discussing time travel, the book credits Steven Spielberg with the movie "Back to the Future", which was in fact directed by Robert Zemeckis. While Spielberg was indeed the executive producer for the movie, this would be the same as referring to "The Godfather" as being a film by Ruddy (instead of Francis Ford Coppola), or more ironically thinking of Spielbergs' "Jaws" as being done by Zanuck and Brown.And in writing this review, I used the index to look up the Spielberg reference in the book -- and the index points to the wrong page. I guess this points up the fact that no matter the caliber of the author, good editors are still in short supply...

I do not have a science background, and I did not read a Brief History of Time when it was originally published or thereafter. So this review is written to a fairly small category of potential readers -- those like me with an interest in modern physics but without much background.I thought the book was exceptionally well written, and it was outstanding in places. It was certainly a very fun read, and I think it achieves a very lofty goal -- making liberal arts grads like me understand both the desirability and potential implications of reconciling general relativity and quantum physics. But, overall, I thought it tried to walk too fine a tightrope between discussing complex subjects and at the same time attempting to be as conversational and accessible as possible. That is a lofty goal -- hard to achieve I think. The reality is that some of these concepts are very very difficult to the uninitiated, so the cursory treatment the authors sometimes give them, in their attempt to make the book accessible and to live up to the "briefER" in the title, actually at times makes the book harder to understand, not easier. It is most acute in the book's introduction to uncertainty, quantum physics, and understanding the implications of interference experiments. More detail, not less, was needed here to reach the authors' goal of accessibility. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't seeking a text heavily laden with mathematics or equations. I just think the overriding editorial doctrine with this book was to condense wherever possible, and that is just not always possible or desirable.All that said, the book achieves it purpose: To take some of the amazing intelligence and insight of one of the world's most important thinkers, squeeze it into understandable packets, and give us ordinary folk some insight into the exciting times in which anyone interested in the Universe and its fundamental questions live. But to steal a little from Einstein, I thought the authors didn't quite follow the second half of his famous exhortation to make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.