Stephen Hawking Book My Brief History: Short Life, Old Space and Time

Summary: The Stephen Hawking book My Brief History hones a unified story from personal and professional points of a short life in a 15-billion-year-old universe.

Stephen Hawking (back right) with first wife, Jane Wilde (back left), and their children Lucy (left) and Robert (right) in 1974: Steve Elliott (jabberwock), CC BY SA 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

The Stephen Hawking book My Brief History, for Bantam Books Sep. 10, 2013, arranges into the theoretical physicist's autobiography 13 personal and professional adventures that afford the unified articulation of his story.

The chapter Childhood broaches his, Mary's and Philippa's births to, and Edward's adoption by, the Oxford-educated tropical medicine researcher son and grandson of bankrupt Yorkshire farmers. It clusters a two-and-a-half-year-old crying about progressive Byron House School's children and "their wonderful toys," a three-year-old collecting trains and an eight-year-old cultivating belated reading skills. The chapter St. Albans discusses a term at the cathedral city's High School for Girls before, and St. Albans School after, Bible study in Deya, Majorca.

Exasperation with wooden and store-bought clockwork and electric trains in Highgate ease into feudal, manufacturing and war game-inventing and model airplane- and boat-building in St. Albans.

The chapter Oxford fits the chemistry and mathematics graduate into University College after summer in Kashmir and Lucknow, India, and before grant-financed, post-graduation travel to Iran.

The chapter Cambridge gathers Dennis Sciama as cosmology, gravitation and general relativity research advisor, Jane Wilde as wife and Robert and Lucy as first- and second-born. The chapter Gravitational Waves heads the Caius College research fellow and student Gary Gibbons into and out of the experimental physics of gravitational wave detector designs. The chapter The Big Bang impels the Ph.D. dissertator toward a universe that, non-spherically, never intersects everything once and that involves ends to space and time.

The chapter Black Holes juggles the product of the collapsed massive star's entryway over the whole-number vibration frequencies of its atoms into radiated energy journeying outward.

The chapter Caltech keys radiation temperatures from Sun-like black holes to one-millionth of a kelvin above absolute zero (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius, minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit).

The chapter Marriage in the Stephen Hawking book My Brief History looks at the Lucasian Professor-elect of Mathematics' son Timothy, speech synthesization and spouse Elaine Marsh. The chapter A Brief History of Time mentions the best-selling author's first of four mass-market science books and his children's cosmic adventure series with daughter Lucy. The chapter Time Travel notes the theoretical physicist's term "particle histories that are closed" for time travel through hypothetical, tubular wormholes as space and time shortcuts.

The chapter Imaginary Time offers a horizontal, present-moment line between past and future real time and a vertical direction of Earth surface-like, finite space without boundaries.

The chapter No Boundaries presents a personally happy, professionally successful Fundamental Physics Prize winner whose motor neurone disease never prevented hot-air balloon, submarine or zero-gravity travel.

Childhood friends Howard, John and William, cousin Sarah and traveling companions John and Richard qualify as the earliest of personal interactions that each chapter queues up. Each chapter reveals non-physics activities, including coxing the Oxford Boat Club, traveling to China, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey and watching British series on California color television. Forty-six images and 126 pages in the Stephen Hawking book My Brief History show a sociable scientist whose savviness shapes theories for subsequent generations to solve.

The Stephen Hawking book My Brief History traverses personal and professional timelines to tender a unified treatment of one mortal, short life in a 15-billion-year-old universe.

44th U.S. President Barack Obama speaks with Stephen Hawking in the White House's Blue Room prior to Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony for Stephen and 15 other honorees; Lucy Hawking is to Stephen's right; Aug. 12, 2009: Pete Souza, Public Domain, 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:

Stephen Hawking (back right) with first wife, Jane Wilde (back left), and their children Lucy (left) and Robert (right) in 1974: Steve Elliott (jabberwock), CC BY SA 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/jabberwock/8478524751/

On Aug. 12, 2009, three months after May 14 release of Stephen Hawking's second collaboration on the George cosmic adventure series with daughter Lucy, 44th U.S. President Barack Obama speaks with Stephen Hawking in the White House's Blue Room prior to Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony for Stephen and 15 other honorees; Lucy Hawking is to Stephen's right: Pete Souza, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barack_Obama_speaks_to_Stephen_Hawking.jpg

For further information:

Hawking, Lucy & Stephen. 2009. George's Secret Key to the Universe. With Christophe Galfard. New York NY: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Hawking, Lucy & Stephen. 2011. George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt. New York NY: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Hawking, Lucy & Stephen. 2013. George and the Big Bang. New York NY: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Hawking, Stephen. 1998. A Brief History of Time. Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen. 2001. The Universe in a Nutshell. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen. 2010. The Grand Design. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen. 2013. My Brief History. New York NY: Bantam Books; and London UK: Bantam Press.