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Unravels the mysteries of the major breakthroughs that have occurred since the release of A Brief History of Time and conveys the excitement felt within the scientific community as the secrets of the cosmos reveal themselves.
Stephen Hawking's phenomenal, multimillion-copy bestseller, A Brief
History of Time, introduced the ideas of this brilliant theoretical
physicist to readers all over the world.
Now, in a major publishing event, Hawking returns with a lavishly illustrated
sequel that unravels the mysteries of the major breakthroughs that have occurred
in the years since the release of his acclaimed first book.
The Universe in a Nutshell
• Quantum mechanics
• M-theory
• General relativity
• 11-dimensional supergravity
• 10-dimensional membranes
• Superstrings
• P-branes
• Black holes
One of the most influential thinkers of our time, Stephen Hawking is an
intellectual icon, known not only for the adventurousness of his ideas but for
the clarity and wit with which he expresses them. In this new book Hawking takes
us to the cutting edge of theoretical physics, where truth is often stranger
than fiction, to explain in laymen's terms the principles that control our
universe.
Like many in the community of theoretical physicists, Professor Hawking is
seeking to uncover the grail of science — the elusive Theory of Everything
that lies at the heart of the cosmos. In his accessible and often playful style,
he guides us on his search to uncover the secrets of the universe — from
supergravity to supersymmetry, from quantum theory to M-theory, from holography
to duality.
He takes us to the wild frontiers of science, where superstring theory and p-branes
may hold the final clue to the puzzle. And he lets us behind the scenes of one
of his most exciting intellectual adventures as he seeks "to combine
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Richard Feynman's idea of
multiple histories into one complete unified theory that will describe
everything that happens in the universe."
With characteristic exuberance, Professor Hawking invites us to be fellow
travelers on this extraordinary voyage through space-time. Copious four-color
illustrations help clarify this journey into a surreal wonderland where
particles, sheets, and strings move in eleven dimensions; where black holes
evaporate and disappear, taking their secret with them; and where the original
cosmic seed from which our own universe sprang was a tiny nut.
The Universe in a Nutshell is essential reading for all of us who want to
understand the universe in which we live. Like its companion volume, A Brief
History of Time, it conveys the excitement felt within the scientific
community as the secrets of the cosmos reveal themselves.
CHAPTER 2
THE SHAPE OF TIME
EINSTEIN'S GENERAL RELATIVITY GIVES TIME A SHAPE.
HOW THIS CAN BE RECONCILED WITH QUANTUM THEORY.
What is time? Is it an ever-rolling stream that bears all our dreams away, as
the old hymn says? Or is it a railroad track? Maybe it has loops and branches,
so you can keep going forward and yet return to an earlier station on the line.
The nineteenth-century author Charles Lamb wrote: "Nothing puzzles me like
time and space. And yet nothing troubles me less than time and space, because I
never think of them." Most of us don't worry about time and space most of
the time, whatever that may be; but we all do wonder sometimes what time is, how
it began, and where it is leading us.
Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in
my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist
approach put forward by Karl Popper and others. According to this way of
thinking, a scientific theory ...
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