Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion

Summary: The book Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion from 1992 clarifies the same-named book from 1988 and film from 1991.

At Pasadena, California's Caltech in Dec. 10, 1974, Stephen Hawking and American theoretical physicist Kip Thorne famously bet about the mass of a black hole at Cygnus X-1; release date Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2002, artwork of artist's impression of Cygnus X-1 by Martin Kornmesser: NASA, ESA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble), CC BY 4.0 International, via Hubble Space Telescope

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion acts as "The Book of The Film of The Book" since it accompanies the documentary produced for Anglia Television by David Hickman.

The 80-minute anecdotal biography brought together cinematographers John Bailey and Stefan Czapsky, director Errol Morris, musician Philip Glass and uncredited producers Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg. Freedman consulted with Kennedy and Spielberg on creating a documentary whose editing Brad Fuller completed with writer Stephen Hawking, author of the same-titled bestseller from 1988. Positive film and DVD and Blu-ray reviews in 1991 and 2014 drew the documentary into The Criterion Collection "important classic and contemporary films" April 15, 2014.

The five-part book Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion simultaneously elucidates "background for those who read the book or watch the film."

The first part furnishes interviews with Michael Church; the physicist's siblings Edward and Mary Hawking; the theoretician's mother Isobel Hawking; Janet Humphrey; Basil King; John McClenahan.

Free-lance journalist Church, Hawking, pediatric tropical medicine doctor King in Kenya and King's Fund College administrator McClenahan in London got together at St. Albans School, 1951-1959. Humphrey, general medicine-trained Freudian analyst, had neighborly roles in North London's Highgate village, as mother of Simon, Hawking's classmate at the progressive Byron House School, 1945-1950. The book's second part includes the memories of Robert Berman and Patrick Sandars; Gordon Berry and Derek Powney; Norman Dix; and Isobel, Mary and Stephen Hawking.

Berman and Sandars judged Harking as physics tutors to the first- through third-year holder of a University College scholarship in natural science at Oxford University, 1959-1962.

Argonne National Laboratory researcher Berry in Chicago, Illinois, Abbs Cross School headmaster Powney in Essex and University College Boatsman Dix knew Hawking as student and coxswain.

Part three lists Bernard Carr and Don Page; Brandon Carter, Antony Hewish, Fred Hoyle, John Taylor, Kip Thorne and John Wheeler; Roger Penrose and Dennis Sciama. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion mentions world-famous physicists Carter, Hewish, Hoyle, Taylor and Wheeler and Hawking dissertation examiners Penrose and Sciama. The year 1974-1975 nestled Oxford graduate Carr, Hawking, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) student Don Page and Professor Kip Thorne personally and professionally together in Pasadena.

Part four offers observations from Carr, Hewish, Page, Penrose, Sciama and Thorne; University of California-Santa Barbara Professor Jim Hartle; Imperial College Professor Christopher Isham in London.

Isham paraphrases the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary, no-edge proposal, from 1982-1983, of an Earthlike-curved, finite, near-smooth universe whose rough irregularities provoke expansion, galaxies and stars in finite space-time.

The fifth part queues up Carr; Isobel, Mary and Stephen Hawking; Humphrey; Isham and Wheeler; Hawking students Raymond Laflamme, Ian Moss and Brian Whitt; and Page. Laflamme's equations reveal that life never regresses, present to past, while an expanding universe's arrow of time from the big bang reverses into the big crunch. Isobel and son Stephen, who suggests that "the universe in time will come to an end at the big crunch," show up in all five sections.

Lucasian Professor of Mathematics Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion teams family with friends and a unified theory's gravity with energy-transmitting particles.

Stephen Hawking attended St. Albans School, Hertfordshire, South East England, from 1951 to 1959; St. Albans School's Abbey Gateway, Hertfordshire, South East England; Friday, April 9, 2004, 14:25: Gary Houston (Ghouston), Public Domain (CC0 1.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

At Pasadena, California's Caltech in Dec. 10, 1974, Stephen Hawking and American theoretical physicist Kip Thorne famously bet about the mass of a black hole at Cygnus X-1; release date Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2002, artwork of artist's impression of Cygnus X-1 by Martin Kornmesser: NASA, ESA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble), CC BY 4.0 International, via Hubble Space Telescope @ https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/cygx1_illust_orig/

Stephen Hawking attended St. Albans School, Hertfordshire, South East England, from 1951 to 1959; St. Albans School's Abbey Gateway, Hertfordshire, South East England; Friday, April 9, 2004, 14:25: Gary Houston (Ghouston), Public Domain (CC0 1.0), via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20040409-003-abbey-gateway.jpg

For further information:

Hawking, Stephen. 1996. The Illustrated A Brief History of Time. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen, ed. 1992. Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion. Edited by Stephen Hawking. Prepared by Gene Stone. New York, NY: Bantam Books.