Physics

A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking, 1988 Executive Summary The book that sold millions of copies and was finished by almost none of its buyers is not, in the end, a book about the universe. It is a book about a boundary: what it means to reach the limit of a thing that contains you. Every chapter sets one up, and every one dissolves it. Hawking’s thesis is that space and time have no far side we could ever reach. A black hole’s horizon is not a surface you bump into but a line past which signals cannot come back. The Big Bang is not a place where something was switched on but the moment the laws break down, at which point “before” stops being a word with a referent. The book’s deepest move, developed in the eighth chapter, is stated in a sentence he liked well enough to repeat: “One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’” ...

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, 2010 Executive Summary Twenty-two years after A Brief History of Time ended by asking what place there is for a creator, Hawking returned with a co-author and a verdict. The Grand Design is no longer than the first book and carries much less argument per page. It is also far more confident, and the confidence is the subject of this review. Its claim is that the universe explains itself: the laws do not need to be set, only to be possible, and once they are possible a universe of our kind will happen. ...