4.3 The Universe in a Nutshell

4.3.1 About the Book

The book The Universe in a Nutshell was published in 2001 by Bantam Book. This book is like a tree: Chapters 1 and 2 form a central trunk, you can pay attention to the individual chapters in any order, because the branches are fairly independent of each other. The illustrations and their annotation, boxes or sidebars provide an alternative route to the text. This structure provides the opportunity to delve into certain topics in more detail than is possible in the main text. In the foreword of the book the author says: “I want to share my excitement at the discoveries that are being made and the picture of reality that is emerging. I have concentrated on areas I have eorked on myself for a greater feeling of immediacy. The details of the work are very technical but I believe the broad ideas can be conveyed without a lot of mathematical baggage. I just hope I have succeeded”. Afterwards, he really succeeded. For the Universe in a Nutshell, he had been awarded by one of the most prestigious price for scientific-popular literature – The Aventis Award, in 2002.

What is the purpose of this success? As we go through the seven chapters, we are involved into the world of latest research in the fields of theoretical physics and astrophysics. There is mentioned the wide variety of Hawkin`s “colleagues”; like Einstein, Newton, Doppler, Maxwell, Planck etc. The results of their research are just like the framework for his own argumentation. This means that reading itself requires a reader at least a little capable in the fields of physics and astronomy. It is beacause Hawking does not burden with elementary pieces of knowledge. Him, with all above mentioned, open up the stream of literally shocking speculations. Sometimes it seems like a tale or sci-fi movie, but everything has a scientific base. We read about curved spacetime, eleven dimensions, world of p-branes, supersymmetric string theory and even theory of everything. Physics of Hawking gives freedom and latitude, it has humour, poetry.
Slovak translation was published in 2002 by publishing house Slovart. The author of the Slovak translation is RNDr. Igor Kapišinský.