London: John Murray, 2018 ISBN 9781473695986
My son purchased this book while we were on holiday, and I picked it up after watching a television show about Hawking, and being a bit too daunted by the idea of reading his magnum opus A Brief History of Time. Brief Answers to the Big Questions is a collection of essays about some of the things that Hawking was most asked about, and was being compiled at the time of his death in 2018, and was finished by his family and published almost as a tribute.
The ten essays in this book look at both what Hawking was famous for - theoretical physics - and other topics that he has thought about and contributed to discussion on. It is the physics that is most interesting, as when he moves into social issues or other science he sheds little more light than many others on these issues.
He does a pretty good job of trying to simplify space-time, and how that operates in the singularities of Black Holes. He also describes well how the Universe could have started with a Big Bang without any prior need to have mass or time. Even so, for a non-scientist such as myself, even these simplified descriptions make my head spin, even after re-reading.
What comes through all these short essays is Hawking's excitement about the cosmos, and what theoretical physics can explain to us about it. He was looking forward to coming advances in space travel and artificial intelligence, while also being wary about what could be unleashed by improper use of technology. He runs a commentary throughout these essays about how long it took humans to evolve the brain we have now: once artificial intelligence overtakes us, we, with our biological time-frame of change, will never be able to catch up. It's a sobering thought.
If you'd like some bite-sized, thought-provoking reading, I can recommend Brief Answers to the Big Questions.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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