A brief history of time

Buck Owens

Just curious about this book. anyone read it? Stephen hawkins wrote it. Is it worth reading,or do you have a big interest in Physics and such to be able to read it?

simu

I read the first four or five chapters of it recently but have yet to finish it. I've found it OK so far, I'd heard most of the ideas before but then again I'd read other books on physics before and my boyfriend did physics at uni so we often have conversations about it.

Worth giving it a go if you're interested in how the universe works.

ArthurG

Read it a couple of years back - seem to remember it started off ok, but quickly became unintelligible for me.... I have a major in process engineering, so am kinda ok with grasping physical/numerical arguments and concepts, but I was lost with this.

There's some joke in a film I saw once - people are discussing this book around the time it came out, everyone was reading it, but noone actually understood it....

Anyway, thats my tuppence worth!

Stark

I thought it was a very interesting book when I read it, but wouldn't it be a bit outdated at this stage?

sceptre

Originally posted by ArthurG
There's some joke in a film I saw once - people are discussing this book around the time it came out, everyone was reading it, but noone actually understood it....

Or in the case of this one, everyone was buying it and no-one was reading it:D

I read it a few years back when I was going through a phase of stuff by Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins, Gleick, Martin Gardener, John L Casti and so on. Interesting read. Bit short but rather interesting. to be honest at times it was a little more difficult to understand than the rest of the above list so I had to read it twice. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a first read, although many well-meaning grannies probably bought it for their younger sciencey grandchildren. Wait for the movie.