Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe: A Review of Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”

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A Brief History of Time reached bookstores in April 1988 with a single equation in it, and the restraint was deliberate. Stephen Hawking, then Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, had been warned that each equation in a popular book would halve its sales, so he held the count to one. The bet paid off on a scale few physics books have matched: reported sales run past 25 million copies in 40 languages. This review covers how the book was made, what it argues, why so many readers are said to stall partway through, and whether it still holds up.

Who Wrote It, and How It Reached Print

Hawking was born in Oxford on January 8, 1942, and was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also known as ALS, in 1963 at the age of 21. He held the Lucasian chair at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009 and died in Cambridge on March 14, 2018. The scientific reputation behind the book rested on work such as his 1970 singularity proof with Roger Penrose, which showed that a universe fitting the standard expanding models must have begun as a singularity, and his 1974 finding that black holes emit radiation and therefore slowly evaporate.

In 1982 Hawking decided to write a popular book to help fund his children’s education and the household, and he finished a first draft in 1984. He chose a mass-market publisher, Bantam Books, over an academic press. Peter Guzzardi, the Bantam editor who handled the book, later described the manuscript as “a slender but extremely dense 100 pages” and said his main job was to keep asking questions until he understood what Hawking meant, so that the finished text stayed accurate without turning impenetrable for a general reader. An earlier conversation had gone differently: Simon Mitton, an astronomy editor at Cambridge University Press whom Hawking approached in 1983, doubted the equations in a draft and worried they would put off the airport-bookstore buyers Hawking wanted to reach.

The book appeared in the United States in April 1988 and in Britain that June. Guzzardi recalled that the first American printing sold out within days. The first edition opened with an introduction by Carl Sagan; Hawking later wrote one of his own. On the Sunday Times list the book set a record for longevity, which Hawking’s agency puts at 264 weeks (another account says 237), and when the paper ranked the top 100 titles since its charts began in 1974, it placed first. Sales figures vary by source: Guzzardi’s 2018 account gave more than 10 million copies in over 35 languages, while the current Wikipedia count is above 25 million in 40. An illustrated, updated and expanded edition followed in 1996, a 1998 paperback carried the same text, and A Briefer History of Time, written with Leonard Mlodinow, arrived in 2005.

What the Book Argues

The structure is a climb. It begins with the history of astronomy, from Aristotle and Ptolemy through Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, then moves into relativity, the speed of light and the expanding universe. The middle chapters cover the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics and the particles and forces of nature. The later chapters turn to black holes, the origin and fate of the universe, the direction of time, and the long search for a unified theory.

Black holes sit near the center of the book because Hawking was describing work he had done himself. He and Jacob Bekenstein tied the area of a black hole’s event horizon to entropy, and the 1974 radiation result followed: pairs of virtual particles near the horizon let a black hole shed energy over time and, eventually, evaporate.

Time gets its own chapters. Hawking separates three arrows of time: the thermodynamic arrow, in which disorder increases; the psychological arrow, the sense that time runs forward; and the cosmological arrow, set by the expansion of the universe. He argues that the three point the same way for any observer, and credits his no-boundary proposal together with the weak anthropic principle for that agreement. The chapter on wormholes and time travel is more sober than its subject suggests. Keeping a wormhole open would require exotic matter with negative energy density, and almost all physicists regard backward time travel as impossible.

A Universe With No Edge

The idea carrying the book’s central argument is the no-boundary proposal. Working in imaginary time, a mathematical device, Hawking proposes that the universe is finite yet has no beginning and no edge, so that it might simply exist. That sidesteps the usual objection that a beginning demands a cause, since there would be no first moment to ask about.

Two cautions apply. The no-boundary idea is a proposal, and it is presented as one rather than as settled physics. And because the text keeps the mathematics out of sight, a general reader is asked to take a good deal on trust. The book conveys what Hawking concluded more fully than it shows why the physics compels the conclusion, which is the price of a title built for the airport-bookstore shelf.

The Question the Equations Cannot Answer

Late in the book, Hawking considers what a complete theory would still leave open. Even a single unified theory would be only a set of rules and equations, and he asks:

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations…”

(Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988), p. 174, as cited by the MacTutor archive at the University of St Andrews.)

The sentence marks the edge of the physicist’s method. A finished theory would describe a universe; it would not say why there is one to describe.

The closing lines return to the same ground. Hawking calls the discovery of a complete theory the peak of human reasoning, and ends on an image that has been quoted ever since:

“…for then we would know the mind of God.”

(Final sentence of A Brief History of Time, as quoted in Wikipedia.)

Read in context, the line is shorthand for the completeness Hawking hoped a unified theory might offer, not a creed. The book does not reach a settled verdict on God’s role, and it argues that modern cosmology had grown divorced from philosophy.

The Most Famous Unfinished Book

The book’s reputation includes a joke at its readers’ expense. In 2014 the mathematician Jordan Ellenberg devised the Hawking Index, which uses the five most-highlighted passages among Amazon Kindle readers to estimate how far people get in a book; highlights bunched near the start produce a low score. A Brief History of Time scored 6.6%. The measure counts highlights, not reading, so it shows where the marking of passages tapered off rather than where readers quit, and it says nothing about people reading in print.

Even so, the pattern is plausible. The chapter on elementary particles and forces sits just before the black hole material, and it asks the most of a non-specialist. Time, which placed the book on its 2011 list of the 100 best nonfiction books written in English since 1923, credited Hawking with seeing that readers care more about why the universe exists than about technical subjects such as event horizons, and with answering those questions in clear physics and metaphor. Both things can be true: a book can be widely read, widely admired and unevenly finished.

Watch: The 1991 Film

Errol Morris’s 1991 documentary takes its title from the book but is not a filmed version of it. It pairs material from the book with a biography of Hawking and interviews with family members and colleagues. Morris had only a few days to film and interview Hawking, who disliked putting his personal life in front of the camera. Philip Glass wrote the score, and the film won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for documentary in 1992. The embedded upload is a full copy of the film; Kottke noted in 2012 that its picture and sound are poor.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need a physics background to read it?
No. Hawking wrote for general readers and held the book to one equation. Expect to slow down in the middle chapters on particles and forces.

Is the book out of date?
In places, yes. It was written before the 1998 supernova results showed that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, and before the first direct detection of gravitational waves, from a collision of two black holes, in September 2015. It remains useful as a record of how one leading physicist framed black holes, the origin of the universe and the unification problem at the end of the 1980s; for current measurements, a more recent source belongs alongside it.

Which edition should a new reader pick?
The 1998 paperback carries the same text as the 1996 illustrated, updated and expanded hardcover, with fewer diagrams. The hardcover adds full-color illustrations and photographs. A Briefer History of Time (2005), written with Leonard Mlodinow, is a shorter version.

Does the book argue against God?
Not in any settled way. It closes on the “mind of God” image as a hope for a complete theory, and it criticizes cosmology for drifting away from philosophy, but it stops short of a verdict on God’s role.

Is the 1991 film the same as the book?
No. The book is solely an explanation of cosmology; the film is a biographical documentary that draws on the book’s ideas.

Where to Read It

A Brief History of Time (affiliate link). The Bantam paperback linked here is a 1998 printing, so it carries the updated text rather than the 1988 original.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. A commission may be earned if you buy through this link, at no extra cost to you.

Further Reading

• Magdalena Ball’s review at Compulsive Reader (2009) calls the book “light and easy and fun, full of subtle humour and provocative notions” and argues it should be required reading from high school up.
• Peter Guzzardi’s account of editing the book, republished by Gulf News from The Guardian.
• Time‘s entry on the book in its All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books list.

Sources

• A Brief History of Time — Wikipedia
• Stephen Hawking — Wikipedia
• Stephen Hawking — Britannica
• A Brief History of Time (film) — Wikipedia
• Hawking Index — Wikipedia
• A brief history of ‘A Brief History of Time’ (Peter Guzzardi, The Guardian) — Gulf News
• The Sunday Times names Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time its top-ranked book of last 50 years — United Agents
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking — Time, All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books
• Stephen Hawking quotations — MacTutor, University of St Andrews
• A review of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking — Compulsive Reader
• A Brief History of Time by Errol Morris — Kottke.org
• A Brief History of Time: Rare 1991 Errol Morris Documentary — The Marginalian
• The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011, press release — NobelPrize.org
• The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017, press release — NobelPrize.org
• Open Library record, ISBN 9780553380163