Stephen Hawking
The world in a nutshell
Preface
I didn't expect my non-fiction book, A Brief History of Time, to be so successful. It remained on the London Sunday Times bestseller list for more than four years - longer than any other book, which is especially surprising for a publication about science, because they usually don’t sell out very quickly. Then people started asking when to expect a sequel. I was reluctant, I didn't want to write something like "Continuation of a short story" or "A little longer history of time." I was also busy with research. But gradually it became clear that another book could be written, which had a chance of being easier to understand. “A Brief History of Time” was structured according to a linear pattern: in most cases, each subsequent chapter is logically connected with the previous ones. Some readers loved it, but others got stuck in the early chapters and never got to the more interesting topics. This book is structured differently - it is more like a tree: chapters 1 and 2 form a trunk, from which the branches of the remaining chapters extend.
These “branches” are largely independent of each other, and, having gained an idea of the “trunk,” the reader can get acquainted with them in any order. They relate to areas in which I have worked or thought about since the publication of A Brief History of Time. That is, they reflect the most actively developing areas of modern research. Within each chapter I have also tried to move away from a linear structure. Illustrations and captions point the reader along an alternative route, as in An Illustrated Brief History of Time, published in 1996. Sidebars and marginal notes allow some topics to be addressed in greater depth than is possible in the main text.
In 1988, when A Brief History of Time was first published, the impression was that the final Theory of Everything was just barely looming on the horizon. How has the situation changed since then? Are we any closer to our goal? As you will learn in this book, the progress has been dramatic. But the journey is still ongoing, and there is no end in sight. As they say, it is better to continue the journey with hope than to arrive at the goal. Our searches and discoveries fuel creativity in all areas, not just science. If we reach the end of the road, the human spirit will wither and die. But I don’t think we will ever stop: we will move, if not in depth, then towards complexity, always remaining in the center of the expanding horizon of possibilities.
I had many helpers while working on this book. I would especially like to acknowledge Thomas Hertog and Neil Shearer for their help with figures, captions and sidebars, Anne Harris and Kitty Fergusson who edited the manuscript (or more accurately the computer files, since everything I write appears in electronic form), Philip Dunn of Book Laboratory and Moonrunner Design, who created the illustrations. But also, I want to thank all those who gave me the opportunity to lead a normal life and engage in scientific research. Without them, this book would not have been written.
A Brief History of Relativity
How Einstein laid the foundations
two fundamental theories of the twentieth century:
general relativity and quantum mechanics
Albert Einstein, the creator of the special and general theories of relativity, was born in 1879 in the German city of Ulm; the family later moved to Munich, where the father of the future scientist, Hermann, and his uncle, Jacob, had a small and not very successful electrical engineering company. Albert was not a child prodigy, but claims that he failed at school seem to be an exaggeration. In 1894, his father's business failed and the family moved to Milan. His parents decided to leave Albert in Germany until he finished school, but he could not stand German authoritarianism and after a few months he left school, going to Italy to join his family. He later completed his education in Zurich, receiving a diploma from the prestigious Polytechnic in 1900 ( E idgenössische T echnische H ochschule - Higher technical school). Einstein's tendency to argue and dislike his superiors prevented him from establishing relationships with ETH professors, so none of them offered him the position of assistant, which usually began his academic career. Only two years later, the young man finally managed to get a job as a junior clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. It was during this period, in 1905, that he wrote three papers that not only made Einstein one of the world's leading scientists, but also marked the beginning of two scientific revolutions - revolutions that changed our ideas about time, space and reality itself.
By the end of the 19th century, scientists believed that they had come close to a comprehensive description of the Universe. According to their ideas, space was filled with a continuous medium - “ether”. Light rays and radio signals were viewed as waves of the ether, just as sound is waves of air density. All that was required to complete the theory was to carefully measure the elastic properties of the ether. With this goal in mind, the Jefferson Laboratory at Harvard University was built without a single iron nail to avoid possible interference in the finest magnetic measurements. However, the designers forgot that the red-brown brick that was used in the construction of the laboratory, and most other buildings at Harvard, contains significant amounts of iron. The building is still in use today, but Harvard still doesn’t know how much weight the library’s floors, which do not contain iron nails, can withstand.
Towards the end of the century, the concept of an all-pervasive ether began to encounter difficulties. Light was expected to travel through the ether at a fixed speed, but if you yourself were moving through the ether in the same direction as the light, the speed of light should appear slower, and if you were moving in the opposite direction, the speed of light would appear to be faster (Figure 1.1). ).
Rice. 1.1 The theory of the stationary ether
If light were a wave in an elastic substance called ether, its speed would appear faster to someone moving in a spaceship towards it (a), and slower to someone moving in the same direction as the light (b).
However, in a number of experiments these ideas could not be confirmed. The most accurate and correct of them was carried out in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case School of Applied Sciences, Cleveland, Ohio. They compared the speed of light in two beams traveling at right angles to each other. As the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the Sun, the speed and direction of movement of the equipment through the ether changes (Fig. 1.2). But Michelson and Morley found no daily or annual differences in the speed of light in the two beams. It turned out that light always moved relative to you at the same speed, no matter how fast and in what direction you were moving (Fig. 1.3).
Rice. 1.2
No differences were found between the speed of light in the direction of the Earth's orbit and the speed of light in the perpendicular direction.
Based on the Michelson-Morley experiment, Irish physicist George Fitzgerald and Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz suggested that bodies moving through the ether should contract and clocks should slow down. This compression and deceleration are such that people will always measure the same speed of light regardless of how they move relative to the ether. (Fitzgerald and Lorentz still considered the ether to be a real substance.) However, in a paper written in June 1905, Einstein noted that if no one can determine whether he is moving through the ether or not, then the very concept of an ether becomes redundant. Instead, he began with the postulate that the laws of physics must be the same for all freely moving observers. In particular, all of them, measuring the speed of light, should receive the same value, no matter how fast they themselves move. The speed of light is independent of their movements and is the same in all directions.
Rice. 1.3. Measuring the speed of light
In the Michelson-More interferometer, the light from the source was split into two beams by a translucent mirror. The rays moved perpendicular to each other, and then united again, falling on a translucent mirror. The difference in the speed of light rays moving in two directions could lead to the fact that the crests of the waves of one ray would arrive simultaneously with the troughs of the waves of the other and cancel each other out.
Stephen Hawking
The world in a nutshell
Preface
I didn't expect my non-fiction book, A Brief History of Time, to be so successful. It remained on the London Sunday Times bestseller list for more than four years - longer than any other book, which is especially surprising for a publication about science, because they usually don’t sell out very quickly. Then people started asking when to expect a sequel. I was reluctant, I didn't want to write something like "Continuation of a short story" or "A little longer history of time." I was also busy with research. But gradually it became clear that another book could be written, which had a chance of being easier to understand. “A Brief History of Time” was structured according to a linear pattern: in most cases, each subsequent chapter is logically connected with the previous ones. Some readers loved it, but others got stuck in the early chapters and never got to the more interesting topics. This book is structured differently - it is more like a tree: chapters 1 and 2 form a trunk, from which the branches of the remaining chapters extend.
These “branches” are largely independent of each other, and, having gained an idea of the “trunk,” the reader can get acquainted with them in any order. They relate to areas in which I have worked or thought about since the publication of A Brief History of Time. That is, they reflect the most actively developing areas of modern research. Within each chapter I have also tried to move away from a linear structure. Illustrations and captions point the reader along an alternative route, as in An Illustrated Brief History of Time, published in 1996. Sidebars and marginal notes allow some topics to be addressed in greater depth than is possible in the main text.
In 1988, when A Brief History of Time was first published, the impression was that the final Theory of Everything was just barely looming on the horizon. How has the situation changed since then? Are we any closer to our goal? As you will learn in this book, the progress has been dramatic. But the journey is still ongoing, and there is no end in sight. As they say, it is better to continue the journey with hope than to arrive at the goal. Our searches and discoveries fuel creativity in all areas, not just science. If we reach the end of the road, the human spirit will wither and die. But I don’t think we will ever stop: we will move, if not in depth, then towards complexity, always remaining in the center of the expanding horizon of possibilities.
I had many helpers while working on this book. I would especially like to acknowledge Thomas Hertog and Neil Shearer for their help with figures, captions and sidebars, Anne Harris and Kitty Fergusson who edited the manuscript (or more accurately the computer files, since everything I write appears in electronic form), Philip Dunn of Book Laboratory and Moonrunner Design, who created the illustrations. But also, I want to thank all those who gave me the opportunity to lead a normal life and engage in scientific research. Without them, this book would not have been written.
A Brief History of Relativity
How Einstein laid the foundations
two fundamental theories of the twentieth century:
general relativity and quantum mechanics
Albert Einstein, the creator of the special and general theories of relativity, was born in 1879 in the German city of Ulm; the family later moved to Munich, where the father of the future scientist, Hermann, and his uncle, Jacob, had a small and not very successful electrical engineering company. Albert was not a child prodigy, but claims that he failed at school seem to be an exaggeration. In 1894, his father's business failed and the family moved to Milan. His parents decided to leave Albert in Germany until he finished school, but he could not stand German authoritarianism and after a few months he left school, going to Italy to join his family. He later completed his education in Zurich, receiving a diploma from the prestigious Polytechnic in 1900 ( E idgenössische T echnische H ochschule - Higher technical school). Einstein's tendency to argue and dislike his superiors prevented him from establishing relationships with ETH professors, so none of them offered him the position of assistant, which usually began his academic career. Only two years later, the young man finally managed to get a job as a junior clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. It was during this period, in 1905, that he wrote three papers that not only made Einstein one of the world's leading scientists, but also marked the beginning of two scientific revolutions - revolutions that changed our ideas about time, space and reality itself.
By the end of the 19th century, scientists believed that they had come close to a comprehensive description of the Universe. According to their ideas, space was filled with a continuous medium - “ether”. Light rays and radio signals were viewed as waves of the ether, just as sound is waves of air density. All that was required to complete the theory was to carefully measure the elastic properties of the ether. With this goal in mind, the Jefferson Laboratory at Harvard University was built without a single iron nail to avoid possible interference in the finest magnetic measurements. However, the designers forgot that the red-brown brick that was used in the construction of the laboratory, and most other buildings at Harvard, contains significant amounts of iron. The building is still in use today, but Harvard still doesn’t know how much weight the library’s floors, which do not contain iron nails, can withstand.
Towards the end of the century, the concept of an all-pervasive ether began to encounter difficulties. Light was expected to travel through the ether at a fixed speed, but if you yourself were moving through the ether in the same direction as the light, the speed of light should appear slower, and if you were moving in the opposite direction, the speed of light would appear to be faster (Figure 1.1). ).
Rice. 1.1 The theory of the stationary ether
If light were a wave in an elastic substance called ether, its speed would appear faster to someone moving in a spaceship towards it (a), and slower to someone moving in the same direction as the light (b).
However, in a number of experiments these ideas could not be confirmed. The most accurate and correct of them was carried out in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case School of Applied Sciences, Cleveland, Ohio. They compared the speed of light in two beams traveling at right angles to each other. As the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the Sun, the speed and direction of movement of the equipment through the ether changes (Fig. 1.2). But Michelson and Morley found no daily or annual differences in the speed of light in the two beams. It turned out that light always moved relative to you at the same speed, no matter how fast and in what direction you were moving (Fig. 1.3).
Lively and intriguing. Hawking has a natural gift for teaching and explaining, and humorously illustrating extremely complex concepts with analogies from everyday life.
New York Times
This book weds childhood wonders to genius intellects. We travel through Hawking's universe, transported by the power of his mind.
Sunday Times
Lively and witty... Allows the general reader to draw deep scientific truths from the original source.
New Yorker
Stephen Hawking is a master of clarity... It is difficult to imagine that anyone else alive today has more clearly presented mathematical calculations that frighten the layman.
Chicago Tribune
Probably the best popular science book. A masterful summary of what modern physicists know about astrophysics. Thank you Dr. Hawking! thinking about the universe and how it came to be this way.
Wall Street journal
In 1988, Stephen Hawking's record-breaking book A Brief History of Time introduced readers around the world to the ideas of this remarkable theoretical physicist. And here's a new important event: Hawking is back! The superbly illustrated sequel, The World in a Nutshell, reveals the scientific discoveries that have been made since the publication of his first, widely acclaimed book.
One of the most brilliant scientists of our time, known not only for the boldness of his ideas but also for the clarity and wit of his expression, Hawking takes us to the cutting edge of research, where truth seems stranger than fiction, to explain in simple terms the principles that govern the universe. Like many theoretical physicists, Hawking longs to find the Holy Grail of science - the Theory of Everything, which lies at the foundation of the cosmos. It allows us to touch the secrets of the universe: from supergravity to supersymmetry, from quantum theory to M-theory, from holography to dualities. We go on an exciting adventure with him as he talks about his attempts to build on Einstein's general theory of relativity and Richard Feynman's idea of multiple histories into a complete unified theory that would describe everything that happens in the Universe.
We accompany him on an extraordinary journey through space-time, and magnificent color illustrations serve as landmarks on this journey through a surreal Wonderland, where particles, membranes and strings move in eleven dimensions, where black holes evaporate, taking their secrets with them, and where the cosmic seed from which our Universe grew was a tiny nut.
Stephen Hawking holds the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Isaac Newton and Paul Dirac. He is considered one of the most prominent theoretical physicists since Einstein.
Preface
I didn't expect my non-fiction book, A Brief History of Time, to be so successful. It remained on the London Sunday Times bestseller list for more than four years - longer than any other book, which is especially surprising for a publication about science, because they usually don’t sell out very quickly. Then people started asking when to expect a sequel. I was reluctant, I didn't want to write something like "Continuation of a short story" or "A little longer history of time." I was also busy with research. But gradually it became clear that another book could be written, which had a chance of being easier to understand. “A Brief History of Time” was structured according to a linear pattern: in most cases, each subsequent chapter is logically connected with the previous ones. Some readers loved it, but others got stuck in the early chapters and never got to the more interesting topics. This book is structured differently - it is more like a tree: chapters 1 and 2 form a trunk, from which the branches of the remaining chapters extend.
These “branches” are largely independent of each other, and, having gained an idea of the “trunk,” the reader can get acquainted with them in any order. They relate to areas in which I have worked or thought about since the publication of A Brief History of Time. That is, they reflect the most actively developing areas of modern research. Within each chapter I have also tried to move away from a linear structure. Illustrations and captions point the reader along an alternative route, as in An Illustrated Brief History of Time, published in 1996. Sidebars and marginal notes allow some topics to be addressed in greater depth than is possible in the main text.
In 1988, when A Brief History of Time was first published, the impression was that the final Theory of Everything was just barely looming on the horizon. How has the situation changed since then? Are we any closer to our goal? As you will learn in this book, the progress has been dramatic. But the journey is still ongoing, and there is no end in sight. As they say, it is better to continue on the path with hope than to arrive at the goal." Our searches and discoveries fuel creativity in all areas, not just in science. If we reach the end of the road, the human spirit will wither and die. But I don’t think we we will ever stop: we will move, if not in depth, then towards complexity, always remaining in the center of the expanding horizon of possibilities.
I had many helpers while working on this book. I would especially like to acknowledge Thomas Hertog and Neil Shearer for their help with figures, captions and sidebars, Anne Harris and Kitty Fergusson who edited the manuscript (or more accurately the computer files, since everything I write appears in electronic form), Philip Dunn of Book Laboratory and Moonrunner Design, who created the illustrations. But also, I want to thank all those who gave me the opportunity to lead a normal life and engage in scientific research. Without them, this book would not have been written.
Oh, Stephen Hawking has already been posted on Funlab. It’s very unexpected, but since he’s here, I can’t remain silent.
First, a little about the author himself: Stephen Hawking is the clearest example of the strength of the human spirit. Finding yourself paralyzed and unable to speak - what could be worse than this fate? But his spirit and Titan's mind overcame his physical weakness. And how we won! Hawking is one of the smartest people living on our planet today. If anyone needs proof of the primacy of the spirit over the body, then here is the proof. Those who complain about their minor problems or sores are an example of a REAL problem and REAL physical weakness. Actually, Stephen Hawking himself is Science Fiction. A man-ascetic, a man-martyr, a man-symbol. :pray:
About the book: I read (or rather, I’m still reading, because things are going very slowly) only one book. The thing is absolutely gorgeous! And like any luxury item, it is quite rare. The book's circulation is 7,000 copies, so it is hardly possible to find it on the shelves of bookstores in small towns. I personally ordered this book via the Internet, on the website www.urss.ru (I ask moderators not to delete the link, since this store distributes exclusively scientific or scientific-educational literature, which often cannot be found anywhere else). An excellent edition in a dust jacket and hardcover on luxurious coated paper (god, how different this is from the cheap and grayish paper that has already become familiar!). Excellent printing, the text is not smudged anywhere. Excellent color drawings that perfectly complement the rather complex text, clearly showing the course of the author's thoughts. In general, it’s not a shame to pay your hard-earned six hundred rubles + pay for delivery by mail for this book.
As for the text itself, it is quite complex. But it is complicated not because the author expresses his thoughts poorly or because he abuses terminology or scary formulas, but because he is trying to explain the most complex and interesting problems that modern physics is struggling to solve. For his part (i.e., on the part of the popular scientist), Hawking did everything he could, but the reader must make a lot of effort to at least understand in general terms what the author is talking about.
In this book, unlike, for example, another best-selling non-fiction book by Brian Greene, “The Elegant Universe,” there are no chapters to refresh your memory of the physical laws of the macro- and microworld. If Brian Greene spent half a book to prepare the reader for the theory of Superstrings and the eleven-dimensional dimension in which they exist, then Stephen Hawking preferred to take the bull by the horns and from the second chapter began to talk about the form of Time, simultaneously recalling the basics of his science. So unprepared people (like me, for example) can sometimes lose the thread of the author's reasoning. However, is it the author’s fault that they taught physics poorly at school? Nothing more than the basic concepts that school teachers tried to give us is required here.
I hasten to please fans of Nick Perumov! The Multiverse, which Hawking talks about in one of the chapters of the book, is very similar (how similar, one to one, even if you announce a “find ten differences” competition) to the Ordered One. So we can say that fantasy operates with modern physical theories.
Of course, the content of the book does not end there and the Author talks about absolutely fantastic things. For example, about the possibility of time travel. Or about those very “wormholes” that are talked about a lot, but few people know.
Bottom line: I can’t raise my hand to give this book less than ten points. Before us is a masterpiece, yes, a masterpiece of popular science literature in the field of physics. Moreover, for once, the masterpiece received a worthy design in the form of an ideal edition (how Brian Greene’s book “The Elegant Universe” lacks this!) Anyone who is at least a little interested in what the best minds of our time are struggling with is a must-read.
Rating: 10
The book is good, but not as good as “A Brief History of Time,” which at one time made a splash in popular science literature.
There are a lot of large, colorful drawings, no complicated formulas, everything can be chewed literally on your fingers. The ideas are indeed very complex and it is not always possible to express them in simple words like this... nevertheless, the author tries to do it. In my opinion, oversimplification of the material significantly damaged the book in terms of information content. Many questions remain for people who want to get to the bottom of the truth on their own, so, ultimately, they have to buy additional literature: Brian Greene, Weinberg, Penrose. Separately, I would like to note the works published by Amphora on Einstein’s theory of relativity (the series is called the “Stephen Hawking Library”).