4.2 A Brief History of Time

4.2.1 About the Book

The book A Brief History of Time was published in 1988 by Bantam Press. It consist of eleven chapters, the updated and expanded edition published in 1996 by Bantam Press, twelve chapters. (“As many people have found parts of the first edition difficult to follow, the aim of the second edition is to make it easier by including large numbers of illustrations.” ) At the end of the book, there are the brief histories (profiles) of Hawking`s main influentals and ideals, Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. He discloses yet unsurveyed areas of physics, astronomy, cosmology and spirit.
It is also the book about God, rather about absence of God. The word God fulfills its pages. “Hawking tries to understand how God thinks. All the more astonishing are his conclusions, at least nowadays: space without borders, without the begginning and the end of time and without anymore work for The Creator.“ The traditions of European science have reached to the point, that God cannot be an object for a scientific research. Science gives place for God for the areas, where finishes its own availability. Hawking, constant to the racionalistic traditions of his ancestors, tries to replace God by natural laws.
The book does not explain and does not translate into the language of a layman only the results of his research, but illustrates also the way of Hawking`s thinking, which led him into them. There are, in abbreviations but very consicely, formulated the basic principles of classic mechanics. Half of the book is basically reserved for physics, not astrophysics. The author does not narrow himself by any taboo. He doesn`t avoid even the most unconfortable questions and only a reader can judge, how suasive his answers are. “At the end of the book it is not sufficiently emphasized, that the vision of space as those models shows, is far from reality yet.“
The book was in the London Sunday Times best seller list for 237 weeks, longer than any other book. It has been translated into something like forty languages (in 1996) and has sold about one copy for every 750men, women and children in the world. ”It entered The Guinness Book of Records as the best selled book of scientific-popular literature ever.”
Slovak translation was published in 1991 by publishing house ALFA and was translated by Anton Šurda. He is a physician.
“The success of A Brief History of Time indicates that there is widespread interest in the big questions like: where did we come from? And why is the universe the way it is?”