"Time: The Fourth Dimension"

We have all heard of black holes in space and the big bang. Few of us understand what these concepts are. Steven Hawking's brilliant book A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME explains these and many other concepts in astronomy in easily understood language. Hawking is a famous astronomer and mathematician, who early in his career, developed Lou Gerigh's disease. Despite this handicap, Hawking pursued his career in science and today holds a position of honor as one of the most highly respected cosmologists in the world. Hawking's description of the universe, as understood by scientists, is put into a conversational style very easy for anyone to understand. High school students could easily grasp Hawking's line of reasoning. Hawking has a sense of humor that adds charm to his book. Diagrams that explain difficult concepts make the concepts more easily grasped. Beautiful photographs add elegance to the book.

Hawking gets into some math but not into excessive detail. He describes the various theories scientists have held, starting with the early Greeks and continuing to current theories today. Hawking describes how modern scientists understand time. The current thinking holds that time is the fourth dimension. We are all familiar with the other three: length, breadth, and depth. All four are properties of matter. Before matter existed, there was no time, no length, no breath, no depth. Hawking describes the big bang, which proposes that all matter in the universe exploded out of an infinitely small amount of space. Before this explosion, as mentioned above, there was no time as we know it. Hawking describes how time started with the big bang and how the universe changed with time. This is why Hawking named his book "a history of time."

There are several current projections of what will happen in the future. The universe might continue to expand. It might stop expanding and stabilize a fixed size. It may reverse direction and collapse all matter back into an infinitely small space. This possibility is called the "big crunch." If you are curious about stars, black holes, gravity, the forces of nature--anything about the universe, you will find Hawking's book fascinating.

Reviewed by Maurice A. Williams
Posted October 26, 2003

Summary

In the years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time has established itself as a landmark volume in scientific writing. It has also become an international publishing phenomenon, translated into forty languages and selling over nine million copies. The book was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the nature of the universe, but since then there have been extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic world. These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book, including the recent discoveries of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), which probed back in time to within 300,000 years of the universe's beginning and revealed the wrinkles in the fabric of space-time that he had projected. Eager to bring to his original text the new knowledge revealed by these many observations, as well as his most recent research, for this revised and expanded edition Hawking has prepared a new introduction to the book, revised and updated the original chapters throughout, and written an entirely new chapter on the fascinating subject of wormholes and time travel. In addition, to heighten understanding of complex concepts that readers may have found difficult to grasp despite the clarity and wit of Hawking's writing, this edition is magnificently enhanced throughout with more than 240 full- color illustrations, including satellite images, photographs made possible by spectacular new technological advances such as the Hubble telescope, and computer- generated images of three- and four-dimensional realities. Detailed captions clarify these illustrations, enabling readers to experience the vastness of intergalactic space, the nature of black holes, and the microcosmic world of particle physics in which matter and antimatter collide. A classic work that now brings to the reader the latest understanding of cosmology, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time is the story of the ongoing search for the tantalizing secrets at the heart of time and space.