A Brief History of Time

“Everybody knows Hawking’s greatest contributions: understanding that black holes radiate light and other particles, that they contain entropy and all these things that no one imagined before him. Hawking and Roger Penrose also worked out the Big Bang singularity, the very moment of creation. To hear him describe some of these things with his own word choices, his own phrasing—not to mention his own personal biography and his disability—there’s no other book like it.” Read more...

The Best Books on the Big Bang

Dan Hooper, Physicist

“A Brief History of Time, for example, is a book that I read when I was in high school, or maybe even before that, and it was one of the books that got me really excited about cosmology. It has held up pretty well – we have discovered a lot about how the universe works since then, but it still gives you a very good overview of what we know. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken with – my generation, or even a little younger – who basically got into astrophysics and cosmology because of that book. So that is a very central one.” Read more...

The best books on Cosmology

David Goldberg, Physicist

“It is a lovely book. It is very hard because he is trying to describe very complicated things, but he has actually done a very good job…… When Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time..his publisher told him that every equation he left in would halve the number of readers” Read more...

The best books on Popular Science

Adam Hart-Davis, Broadcaster