A review by flappie55
A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow
3.0
The first few chapters of the book are very well done. They explain the concepts of Special Relativity and The Uncertainty Principle and the different forces in the Standard Model in a very brief but clear manner.
The part of Black Holes that follows after that is still pretty nice and quite readable. But becomes more difficult to read because Hawking tries to explain it quite thoroughly but doesn't have enough time to go too much into detail, which makes this chapter very vague. In the rest of the book this vagueness is even more prominent because the writer really want to give an in-depth expenation, but doesn't have enough space to do so.
A few remarks on the writing style: First if all Hawking's sense of humor is clearly present in his book as well. A few funny sentences here and there take your mind off the difficult physics and make the whole much more readable (although I missed this humour again in the last few chapters).
Secondly what I found somewhat irritating was the constant reference for God an the Bible in this book. True, historically there used to be some debate between science and religion but nowadays a book about science shouldn't mention religion in the way Hawking does. Mostly because when he mentions it, it is almost always irrelevant to the topic he is talking about. This conclusion for example (which is 5 pages long in my edition) mentions God at least 6 times. Personally I find this very irritating and unnecessary.
Another thing that struck me as a bit odd is that the book is not that scientific in the sense that some of the things Hawking proposes aren't generally accepted by the scientific community (as far as I know) but he doesn't mention this. It is a really nice popular science book but not that scientific.
In the end I think if one is interested in the basics of quantum physics and relativity the first few chapters of this book are definitely a recommended read. If you are interested in Black Holes, GUTs and The Big Bang, maybe try finding another book.
The part of Black Holes that follows after that is still pretty nice and quite readable. But becomes more difficult to read because Hawking tries to explain it quite thoroughly but doesn't have enough time to go too much into detail, which makes this chapter very vague. In the rest of the book this vagueness is even more prominent because the writer really want to give an in-depth expenation, but doesn't have enough space to do so.
A few remarks on the writing style: First if all Hawking's sense of humor is clearly present in his book as well. A few funny sentences here and there take your mind off the difficult physics and make the whole much more readable (although I missed this humour again in the last few chapters).
Secondly what I found somewhat irritating was the constant reference for God an the Bible in this book. True, historically there used to be some debate between science and religion but nowadays a book about science shouldn't mention religion in the way Hawking does. Mostly because when he mentions it, it is almost always irrelevant to the topic he is talking about. This conclusion for example (which is 5 pages long in my edition) mentions God at least 6 times. Personally I find this very irritating and unnecessary.
Another thing that struck me as a bit odd is that the book is not that scientific in the sense that some of the things Hawking proposes aren't generally accepted by the scientific community (as far as I know) but he doesn't mention this. It is a really nice popular science book but not that scientific.
In the end I think if one is interested in the basics of quantum physics and relativity the first few chapters of this book are definitely a recommended read. If you are interested in Black Holes, GUTs and The Big Bang, maybe try finding another book.