The story:
The book is a truly enlightening one: a classic introduction to today's most important scientific ideas about the cosmos, and a unique opportunity to experience the intellect of one of the most imaginative, influential thinkers of our age.
From the vantage point of the wheelchair where he has spent the last twenty years trapped by Lou Gehrig's disease, Professor Hawking himself has transformed our view of the universe. His groundbreaking research into black holes offers clues to that elusive moment when the universe was born. Now, in the incisive style which is his trademark, Professor Hawking shows us how mankind's "world picture" has evolved from the time of Aristotle through the 1915 breakthrough of Albert Einstein, to the exciting ideas of today's prominent young physicists.
Was there a beginning of time? Will there be an end? Is the universe infinite? or does it have boundaries? With these fundamental questions in mind, Hawking reviews the great theories of the cosmos -- and all the puzzles, paradoxes and contradictions still unresolved. With great care he explains Galileo's and Newton's discoveries. Next he takes us step-by-step throught Einstein's general theory of relativity (which concerns the extraordinarily vast) and then moves on to the other great theory of our century, quantum mechanics (which concerns the extraordinarily tiny). And last, he expores the worldwide effort to combin the two into a single quantum theory of gravity, the unified theory, which should resolve all the mysteries left unsolved -- and he tells why he believes that momentous discovery is not far off.
Professor Hawking also travels into the exotic realms of deep space, distant galaxies, black holes, quarks, GUTs, particles with "flavors" and "spin, " antimatter, the "arrows of time" -- and intrigues us with their unexpected implications. He reveals the unsettling possibilities of time running backward when an expanding universe collapses, a universe with as many as eleven dimensions, a theory of a "no boundary" universe that may replace the big bang theory and a God who may be increasingly fenced in by the new discoveries -- who may be the prime mover in the creation of it all.

About the author:
Stephen W. Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on Jan. 8, 1942. At the afge of eleven Stephen went to St Albans School, and then on to University College, Oxford, where his father studied, too. Stephen did Physics and only after three years and not much work he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science.
He then went to Cambridge where he did research in Cosmology. After obtaing his Ph.D. he became a Research Fellow, later a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1973 and since 1979 held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a professorship which was already held by Isaac Newton in 1663).
Together with Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear.
Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.

Buchdaten:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME by Stephen Hawking
Broschiert - 224 Seiten - Bantam
Erscheinungsdatum: Mai 2001
ISBN: 0553176986
Preis: € 10,80



More works from the same author:

hier online bestellen The Universe in a Nutshell