Een half jaar geleden eens als gratis audioboek bij De Standaard gedownload en pas nu de tijd gehad om het helemaal te beluisteren. Wel fijn dat dit boek ook deels een autobiografie is, want bij iedere vraag durft Hawking wel eens 'Slumbog Millionaire'-gewijs uit te breiden en terug te blikken op zijn leven.

Wonderful book. I’ve just joined a book club with friends and this is the first book. Here are my thought/questions/memorable quotes that I plan discuss with the other guys.

1. What is nothing?
2. What exactly is a singularity. What is a ‘single point’
3. Black hole chapter went over my head . Maybe Stephen got a bit carried away with ‘ his thing’. Does it matter? Why is it a “Big Question”
4. If I was caught speeding by the police and the evidence was “we saw you outside the fish and chip shop travelling at 50mph in a 30 zone”. Doesn’t this undermine Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle where you can’t measure precisely position and speed at the same time? Would the judge listen? :-)
5. “ if you want to apply for a grant to study time travel you have to call it “closed time curve” otherwise you’re labelled a crank
6. “ I’m pretty sceptical of conspiracy theories as I believe cock- up theory is much more likely” ( in the context of time travel and why nobody has come back from the future to tell us about it)
7. “If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher. When each of us thinks what we can do if life, chances are we can do it because of a teacher”
8. Our nearest black hole is 2800 light years away but somehow we can study them. That’s amazing
9. “ I think the survival of the human race will depend on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe.”
10. “ I would hope to be remembered for my work on black holes and the origin of the universe. But above all I would like to be remembered by my children and grandchildren as a great Dad and Granddad”

He discussed very interesting points in this book. Also it gives a great overview of the current state of modern physics without the need of deep knowledge in the fields (Although it helps of course).
On the other hand, the book might b a bit to scientific for "normal" people.

In a book that only professes to give brief answers, it is to be expected that some details will be glossed over. Therefore, I didn't understand the discussions about multiple cosmological histories or the universe coming in to being from nothing. Other topics fared better like the uncertainty principle and black holes.

Stephen Hawking had such a bright optimism for humankind, and this book turned out to be his spectacular, bittersweet, last correspondence to us all. He tackles big questions in such a way that you forget they are big. That isn't to say he makes the big questions seem trivial, just that he has a way of conceptualizing problems in such a way to make them easy to parse.
You don't need to be a mathematician or physics wiz to understand and enjoy this book; I think just about anyone can gain something from reading Hawking's Brief Answers.

Overdrive

Quite technical and hard going in places