The Illustrated Theory of Everything.

STEPHEN W. HAWKING

Hawking is widely viewed as the greatest living astrophysicist and one of the most brilliant scientific minds ever. In his book A Brief History of Time, he gracefully defined his field for the nonscientist. In that same style, he presents here a series of seven lectures in which he outlines what he and other scientists propose as the history of the universe from the Big Bang to today. He begins with a discussion of how past ideas shape the present outlook of astrophysicists and then examines how Isaac Newton's and Albert Einstein's explanations of gravity led to the conclusion that the universe can't be static. In other lectures, Hawking details the nature of black holes and how quantum mechanics permits energy to leak from them. Then, he applies quantum mechanics ideas to the Big Bang and the origin of the universe and proposes that space-time may be both finite and without boundary, if considered in extra dimensions. This discussion leads to a final lecture on the quest for a unified theory of the universe that would take into consideration quantum mechanics as well as Newton's and Einstein's version of gravity and the other physical forces. All seven lectures are enhanced by gorgeous color photo-graphs captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The text was originally published in 1996 as The Cambridge Lectures. New Millennium Pr, 2003, 119 p., color photos, hardcover, $29.95.