Black Holes and Baby Universes, and Other Essays.

By Stephen Hawking (Bantam, 182 pp., $21.95)

THE PHENOMENAL success of Mr. Hawking's best-seller, A brief History of Time, is probably the rationale for this follow-up, a glib collection of essays, most of which deal in an unsatisfying general way with recent developments in physics. In fact, Mr. Hawking writes in one chapter that he was astounded by his earlier book's success--which is an honest thing to say, because it wasn't a very good book, and neither is this. In Black Holes, only the title essay and two pieces on quantum theory evoke any real scientific interest. There's even an embarrassing gaffe in chapter ten, when Mr. Hawking states that average stars burn oxygen into helium--instead of hydrogen into helium. Mr. Hawking, who suffers from Lou Gehrig's Disease, has become something of a media darling. He was even featured in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, playing himself. But all the hype suggesting he is another Einstein is just that: hype. Mr. Hawking has made significant contributions to the study of black holes, but his work is purely theoretical--a clever application of general relativity and quantum mechanics. His attempts at popular science writing, meanwhile, are not clever at all. His sense of humor is practically non-existent, and he makes no attempt, as do writers such as Jeremy Bernstein and Paul Davies, to recount the early history of modern physics in a fashion that would make it more accessible (and appealing) to non-scientists.