Reading Order
A Brief History of Time Reading Order
Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988) is the best-selling popular science book in history — an accessible account of cosmology, quantum mechanics, and the search for a unified theory of the universe, written by one of the world's most celebrated physicists while he was confined to a wheelchair by ALS, that sold over 10 million copies and spent 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list.
Where to start
A Brief History of Time
Complete A Brief History of Time Book List
- 1Buy
A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking·1988·The foundational popular account. Start here. - 2Buy
The Universe in a Nutshell
Stephen Hawking·2001·Hawking's illustrated update — covering string theory and M-theory developed since A Brief History. Read second. - Buy
A Briefer History of Time
OptionalStephen Hawking·2005·A shorter, revised, and updated version co-written with Leonard Mlodinow. Read as a companion or replacement if A Brief History feels dense.
A Brief History of Time — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Hawking radiation?
Hawking radiation is the theoretical prediction — made by Stephen Hawking in 1974 — that black holes should emit thermal radiation due to quantum effects near the event horizon, and that this radiation would cause black holes to slowly lose mass and eventually evaporate completely. The mechanism involves virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that quantum mechanics allows to spontaneously appear at the event horizon: one particle falls into the black hole, and the other escapes into space, effectively carrying away energy from the black hole. The radiation is extremely weak for stellar-mass black holes (far too faint to detect with current technology) but would be detectable for tiny primordial black holes. Hawking radiation resolved a paradox in thermodynamics — black holes absorbing matter without emitting anything would violate the second law of thermodynamics — but created a new one (the information paradox: what happens to the information encoded in the matter that fell in?).
What is the search for a 'theory of everything'?
The theory of everything — sometimes called the Grand Unified Theory or the Theory of Quantum Gravity — is the hypothetical theoretical framework that would reconcile the two great, mutually incompatible theories of 20th-century physics: general relativity (Einstein's account of gravity and the large-scale structure of space-time) and quantum mechanics (the account of atomic and subatomic phenomena). Each theory is extraordinarily successful within its domain, but the two cannot both be correct as stated: general relativity treats space-time as a smooth continuum, while quantum mechanics treats everything as discrete and probabilistic. Hawking devoted much of his career to the search for the theory that would unify them, most famously through his work on the quantum properties of black holes, which occur at the intersection of both theories (extremely massive and extremely small). String theory and M-theory are the leading current candidates.
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