Stephen Hawking's brief history. Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

The publishing house expresses gratitude to the literary agencies Writers House LLC (USA) and Synopsis Literary Agency (Russia) for assistance in acquiring the rights.

© Stephen Hawking, 1988.

© N. Ya. Smorodinskaya, per. from English, 2017

© Ya.A. Smorodinsky, afterword, 2017

© AST Publishing House LLC, 2017

Dedicated to Jane

I decided to try writing a popular book on space and time after giving a Loeb Lecture course at Harvard in 1982. Then there were already many books on the early Universe and black holes, both very good, for example, the book by Steven Weinberg "The First Three Minutes", and very bad, which need not be called here. But it seemed to me that none of them actually touched on the questions that prompted me to study cosmology and quantum theory: where did the universe come from? How and why did it arise? Will it end, and if it does, how? These questions are of interest to all of us. But modern science is saturated with mathematics, and only a few specialists know it enough to understand all this. However, the basic ideas about the birth and the further fate of the Universe can be stated without the help of mathematics so that they will become understandable even to people who have not received a special education. This is what I tried to do in my book. How much I have succeeded in this is for the reader to judge.

I was told that each formula included in the book would halve the number of buyers. Then I decided to do without formulas altogether. True, at the end I did write one equation - the famous Einstein equation E \u003d mc²... I hope it doesn't scare off half of my potential readers.

Apart from my ailment - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - in almost everything else I was lucky. The help and support I received from my wife Jane and children Robert, Lucy and Timothy gave me the opportunity to lead a relatively normal life and succeed in my work. I was also lucky that I chose theoretical physics, because it all fits in my head. Therefore, my bodily weakness did not become a serious obstacle. My colleagues, all without exception, have always provided me with maximum assistance.

At the first, "classical" stage of work, my closest colleagues and assistants were Roger Penrose, Robert Gerock, Brandon Carter and George Ellis. I am grateful to them for their help and cooperation. This stage culminated in the publication of the book The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time, which Ellis and I wrote in 1973. I would not advise readers to turn to it for additional information: it is overloaded with formulas and difficult to read. I hope that since then I have learned to write more easily.

In the second, "quantum" phase of my work, which began in 1974, I worked mainly with Gary Gibbons, Don Page and Jim Hartle. I owe a lot to them, as well as to my graduate students, who provided me with tremendous help both in the "physical" and "theoretical" sense of the word. The need to keep up with graduate students was an extremely important incentive and, it seems to me, did not allow me to get stuck in a swamp.

One of my students, Brian Witt, helped me a lot with this book. In 1985, after sketching out the first rough outline of the book, I got pneumonia. And then - the operation, and after the tracheotomy, I stopped talking, effectively losing the opportunity to communicate. I thought I could not finish the book. But not only did Brian help me redesign it, he taught me how to use the Living Center computer communication program, which Walt Waltosh of Words Plus, Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., Gave me. With her help, I can write books and articles, as well as talk to people using a speech synthesizer donated to me by another Sunnyvale company, Speech Plus. David Mason installed this synthesizer and a small personal computer in my wheelchair. This system changed everything: it became even easier for me to communicate than before I lost my voice.

To many of those who read the preliminary versions of the book, I am grateful for advice on how it could be improved. For example, Peter Gazzardi, editor of Bantam Books, sent me letter after letter with comments and questions about those points which, in his opinion, were poorly explained. Frankly, I was very annoyed when I received a huge list of recommended fixes, but Gazzardi was absolutely right. I'm sure the book is much better thanks to Gazzardi poking my nose at mistakes.

My deepest gratitude goes to my assistants Colin Williams, David Thomas and Raymond Laflemm, my secretaries Judy Fell, Anne Ralph, Cheryl Billington and Sue Macy, and my nurses.

I wouldn’t have achieved anything if the costs of research and necessary medical care had not been covered by Gonville & Caius College, the Council for Scientific and Technological Research, and the Leverhulme, MacArthur, Nuffield, and Ralph Smith Foundations. I am very grateful to all of them.

Stephen Hawking

Once a famous scientist (they say it was Bertrand Russell) gave a public lecture on astronomy. He told how the Earth revolves around the Sun, and the Sun, in turn, revolves around the center of a huge cluster of stars, which is called our Galaxy. As the lecture drew to a close, a little old lady stood up from the last row and said, “Everything you told us is nonsense. In fact, our world is a flat plate that sits on the back of a giant turtle. " Smiling condescendingly, the scientist asked: "What does the turtle rest on?" “You are very intelligent, young man,” the old lady replied. "The turtle is on the other turtle, the one is also on the turtle, and so on, and so on."

The idea of \u200b\u200bthe universe as an endless tower of turtles will seem ridiculous to most of us, but why do we think we know everything better? What do we know about the Universe and how did we know it? Where did the universe come from and what will become of it? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before the beginning? What is the essence of time? Will it ever end? The achievements of physics in recent years, which we owe to some extent to the fantastic new technology, allow us to finally get answers to at least some of these long-standing questions. Time will pass, and these answers will probably be as indisputable as the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and maybe as ridiculous as a tower of turtles. Only time (whatever it is) will decide this.

Back in 340 BC. e. the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book On the Sky, gave two compelling arguments in favor of the fact that the Earth is not flat like a plate, but round like a ball. First, Aristotle guessed that lunar eclipses occur when the Earth is between the Moon and the Sun. The Earth always casts a round shadow on the Moon, and this can only be if the Earth has the shape of a ball. If the Earth were a flat disk, its shadow would have the shape of an elongated ellipse - unless the eclipse always occurs exactly at the moment when the Sun is exactly on the axis of the disk. Secondly, from the experience of their sea voyages, the Greeks knew that in the southern regions the North Star is observed lower in the sky than in the northern ones. (Since the North Star is located above the North Pole, it will be directly above the head of an observer standing at the North Pole, and it will seem to a person at the equator that it is on the horizon.) Knowing the difference in the apparent position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle was even able to calculate that the length of the equator is 400,000 stades. It is not known exactly what the stages were, but it was approximately 200 meters, and, therefore, Aristotle's estimate is about 2 times higher than the value accepted now. The Greeks also had a third argument in favor of the spherical shape of the Earth: if the Earth is not round, then why do we first see the sails of a ship rising above the horizon, and only then the ship itself?

Stephen Hawking is a legendary English theoretical physicist and popularizer of science, known for his work on black holes. As a result of his illness, Hawking was confined to a wheelchair, which, in spite of everything, did not break, but only inspired the famous scientist. Today Hawking continues to lecture, write books, communicate with fans and make important warnings to mankind: about meeting aliens, about artificial intelligence, about the resettlement of civilizations to another planet, and remains one of the largest and most respected modern scientists.

A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is Stephen Hawking's most popular book, first published in 1988. The book talks about the emergence of the universe, the nature of space and time, black holes, superstring theory and some mathematical problems, but pages of the edition you can find only one formula E \u003d mc². The book has become a bestseller since its release and continues to be.

This was the "official" annotation for the book, and now I would like to say a few words from myself. Many will not like them.

The book is quite entertaining, but I did not find anything in it that caused so much noise. There are a few interesting places, something has cleared up, something has become even more incomprehensible. The absence of formulas is certainly a good thing, but Hawking replaced formulas with a solid wall of text. The book is completely lacking at least some kind of structure. Few illustrations, but those that are not illustrative. Hawking promised imaginative analogies ... there are hardly any. Just about, something seems to begin to clear up, but the author moves somewhere to the side and completely forgets about the previous topic and you feel that he will not come back, believing that everything is already clear ... but it is, an infection, is incomprehensible ...

Those moments, which I hoped for clarification, are either not mentioned here at all or are mentioned in passing and are not interesting. The main thing: I did not find answers to my simple questions in it.

Physics and cosmology are sciences that cannot be studied using such little books. Well ... the book is ancient, written almost 30 years ago, this is not a dialectic that can be studied according to Hegel. By the standards of our time, much in it is already outdated, refuted and supplemented. So, wasted time.

I just found out that there is a book published in 2005, revised and supplemented. But ... I will not read it. Firstly - 2005 was exactly 12 years ago, which, as it were, not yesterday, and secondly - it will be the same text fence with new formulas in text form. Most likely, what is interesting to me there will also be small.

Perhaps someone will be interested, I am posting the 2005 edition in FB2 and RTF formats. Download, read:

The bottom line: informative, little, chaotic. I had a desire to look for other sources of information, which is good, at least the book fulfilled this function. My searches so far have not been crowned with success. Too many theories, too many things. Charlatans also come across, you waste time on them, and then you realize that you have been cheated. For example, I spent several hours watching videos of a certain Katyuschik. At first it was interesting, sound thoughts, good explanations, and then suspicions arose, which led me to the fact that this gentleman should not be trusted without looking back, as many do. We need to think hard. His words go against fundamental science, and his arguments are not always convincing. So you need to read a lot in order to touch this immense topic at least with the edge of your brain. The book "A Brief History of Time" did not help me in this ...

10. A Brief History of Time

The idea of \u200b\u200bwriting a popular science book about the Universe first came to me in 1982. In part, my goal was to make money to pay for school fees for my daughter. (In fact, by the time the book was published, she was already in her final grade.) But the main reason for writing the book was that I wanted to explain how far, in my opinion, we have advanced in understanding the universe: how close we possibly are to creating a complete theory describing the universe and everything in it.

Since I was going to put the time and energy into writing such a book, I wanted as many people as possible to read it. Before that, my purely scientific books were published by Cambridge University Press. The publisher did its job in good faith, but I felt that it would not be able to reach as wide an audience as I would have liked. So I contacted literary agent Al Zuckerman, who was introduced to me as the son-in-law of one of my colleagues. I gave him a draft of the first chapter and explained my desire to make a book similar to those sold at airport kiosks. He told me that there was no chance for that. Scientists and students, of course, will buy it, but such a book will not break into Jeffrey Archer's territory.

I gave the first draft of the book to Zuckerman in 1984. He sent it to several publishers and recommended that they accept the offer from Norton, an elite American book company. But against his advice, I accepted the offer from Bantam Books, a publisher focused on the general reader. Although Bantam did not specialize in non-fiction, his books were widely available in airport bookstores.

Perhaps Bantam became interested in this book thanks to one of the editors, Peter Guzzardi. He took his work very seriously and made me rewrite the book so that it was understandable to non-specialists like himself. Every time I sent him a revised chapter, he responded with a long list of shortcomings and questions that, in his opinion, needed to be clarified. At times I thought this process would never end. But he was right: the book turned out much better as a result.

My work on the book was interrupted by pneumonia, which I contracted at CERN. It would have been absolutely impossible to finish the book if it had not been for the computer program provided to me. It was pretty slow, but I was thinking leisurely then, so it was fine. With her help, I, urged on by Guzzardi, almost completely rewrote the original text. This revision was assisted by one of my students, Brian Witt.

Cover of the first edition of A Brief History of Time

I was very impressed by Jacob Bronowski's television series The Rise of Man. (Such a sexist name would not be allowed to be used today.) It gave a sense of the achievements of the human race and its development from primitive savages, which it was only fifteen thousand years ago, to our present state. I wanted to evoke similar feelings about our movement towards a full understanding of the laws governing the universe. I was sure that almost everyone is interested in how the universe works, but most people cannot understand mathematical equations. I don't really like them myself. Partly because it is difficult for me to write them, but most importantly, I have no intuitive sense of formulas. Instead, I think in visual images, and in my book I tried to express these images in words, using familiar analogies and a small number of schemes. Having chosen this path, I hoped that most people would be able to share with me the admiration for the successes that physics has achieved as a result of its amazing progress over the past fifty years.

Still, some things are difficult to understand, even if math is avoided. I was faced with a problem: should I try to explain them at the risk of misleading people, or should I, so to speak, just sweep the garbage under the carpet? Some strange notions, such as the fact that observers moving at different speeds measure different periods of time for the same pair of events, were irrelevant to the picture I wanted to paint. So I felt like I could just mention them without going into details. But there were also complex ideas that were essential to what I was trying to convey.

There were two concepts that seemed particularly important to me to include in the book. One of them is the so-called summation over stories. This is the idea that the universe has more than one history. On the contrary, there is a collection of all possible histories of the universe, and all of these stories are equally real (whatever that means). Another idea needed to give mathematical meaning to summation over stories is imaginary time. Now I realize that I should have put more effort into explaining these two concepts, as they are the points in the book that people have the most difficulty with. However, it is not at all necessary to understand exactly what imaginary time is; it is quite enough to know that it differs from what we call real time.

When the book was about to come out, the scientist who was sent a signal copy to prepare a review for the journal Nature, I was horrified to find in it a huge number of errors - incorrectly placed photos and diagrams with incorrect signatures. He called Bantam, they were also horrified there, and on the same day they recalled and destroyed the entire circulation. (The surviving copies of this present first edition are now probably highly valued.) The publisher spent three weeks of hard work rechecking and correcting the entire book, and it was ready in time, just in time for the announced April Fool's Day release date. fool's day. Then the magazine Time published curriculum vitae about me with a take out on the cover.

Despite all this, Bantam was surprised by the demand for my book. She remained on the bestseller list The New York Times for 147 weeks, and on the bestseller list of London Times -in a record 237 weeks, has been translated into 40 languages \u200b\u200band sold over 10 million copies worldwide.

I originally titled the book "From the Big Bang to Black Holes: A Short History of Time", but Guzzardi reversed the title and subtitle and replaced "short" to "brief". It was brilliant and must have contributed significantly to the book's success. Since then, there have been many "short stories" of one or the other and even "A Brief History of Thyme" ("A Brief History of Thyme"). Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.

Why was this book bought like that? It is difficult for me to be sure of my objectivity, and I'd rather quote what others have said. It turned out that most of the reviews, albeit approving ones, do little to clarify. Basically, they are built according to the same scheme: Stephen Hawking suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease (term used in American reviews) or motor neuron disease (UK reviews). He is confined to a wheelchair, cannot speak and only moves N fingers (Where N ranged from one to three, depending on how inaccurate the article about me read by the reviewer). Yet he wrote this book about the greatest of all questions: where did we come from and where are we going? Hawking's answer is that the universe was not created and will never be destroyed - it just is. To express this thought, Hawking introduces the concept of imaginary time, which I (i.e. reviewer) somewhat at a loss to understand. However, if Hawking is right and we do find a complete unified theory, then we truly understand God's purpose. (During the proofreading phase, I almost removed from the book the last phrase that we understand God's plan. If I did, sales would have dropped by half.)

Much more insightful to me is an article in a London newspaper The Independent, where it is said that even such a serious scientific book as "A Brief History of Time" can become a cult. I was very flattered by the comparison with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hope that, like her, my book gives people a sense that they should not be dismissed from the great intellectual and philosophical questions.

Undoubtedly, the human interest in the story of how I managed to become a theoretical physicist, despite my disability, also played a role. But those who bought the book just for the sake of it were disappointed, since my condition is mentioned there only a couple of times. The book was meant to be the history of the universe, not my story. That didn’t save Bantam from accusations that they were shamelessly exploiting my disease and that I was indulging it by allowing my photo to be on the cover. In fact, under the contract, I had no right to influence the design of the cover. True, I managed to convince the publisher to use a better photo for the British edition than the nasty old photo that was in the American version. Nevertheless, the photo on the American cover remains the same, since, as I was told, the American public identifies this photo with the book itself.

It has also been argued that many people bought the book to display on their bookshelf or coffee table without actually reading it. I am sure that this was the case, although I don’t think it was more so than with numerous other serious books. And yet I know that at least some of the readers should have made their way through it, since every day I receive a pile of letters about this book, and many of them contain questions or detailed comments, which indicates that people are a book have read it, even if they did not fully understand it. They also stop me on the street and say how much they liked her. The frequency with which I receive such an expression of public recognition (although I am, of course, a very different author from others, if not the most excellent one), it seems to me, convinces that a certain part of the people who bought the book really read it.

After A Brief History of Time, I wrote several more books to bring scientific knowledge to the widest possible audience. These are "Black Holes and Young Universes", "The World in a Nutshell" and "Greater Design". I think it is very important that people have the basics of scientific knowledge, which will allow them to make informed decisions in a world where science and technology play an ever larger and larger role. In addition, my daughter Lucy and I have written a series of books for children - tomorrow's adults. These are adventure stories based on scientific ideas.