Stephen Hawking - A Life in Science

Stephen Hawking - A Life in Science

Product ID: 12805

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Author: Michael White
John Gribbin/
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1992
Language: English
Pages: 305
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140156151

Description

When Stephen Howking was involved in a minor road accident in Cambridge city centre early in 1991, within twelve hours American TV networks were on the phone to his publisher, Bantam, for a low-down on the story. The fact that he suffered only minor injuries and was back at his desk within days was irrelevant. But, anything about Stephen Howking is newsworthy. This would never have happened to any other scientist in the world. Apart from the fact that physicists are seen as somehow different from other human beings, existing outside the normal patterns of human life, there is no other scientist alive as famous as Stephen Hawking.

But Stephen Hawking is no ordinary scientist. His book A Brief History of Time has notched dup worldwide sales in the millions-publishing statistics usually associated with the likes of Jeffrey Archer and Stephen King. What is even more astonishing is that Hawking’s book deals with a subject so far removed from normal bedtime reading that the prospect of tackling such a text would send the average person into a paroxysm of inadequacy. Yet, as the world knows, Professor Hawking’s book is a massive hit and has made his name around the world. Somehow, he has managed to circumvent prejudice and to communicate his esoteric theories directly to the lay-reader.

REVIEWS

A gripping account of a physicist whose speculations could prove as revolutionary as those of Albert Einstein…It can be consulted as a clear and authoritative guide through three decades of Hawking’s central contributions to cosmology.
-Bernard Dixon in the New Statesman & Society

Excellent…From the opening pages, which relate the occasion when Shirley MacLaine sought an audience with her hero in a Cambridge restaurant, to the final chapter on Hollywood, Fame and Fortune, the book is well-nigh unputdownable…It ought to be read alongside A Brief History of Time as a kind of explanatory supplement.
-Heather Couper in The Times Educational Supplement

Fascinating…What makes this book so rewarding is the way that the authors have blended their account of Hawking’s science with that of his life, giving a picture of a remarkable scientist as a remarkable person,
-Tony Osman in the Spectator

It’s compulsive reading, maybe because Hawking towers above it all, a complex and fascinating character who remains strangely elusive: boyish yet indomitable, stubborn yet charming, a private man reveling in fame.
-Clare Francis in the Sunday Express

Their book conveys how scientific research is not just a dry intellectual pursuit but an adventure full of joy, despair and humour, and fraught with the sort of inter-personal problems and rivalries which mark all human endeavours.
–Bernard Carr in the Independent on Sunday

Few scientists become legends in their own lifetime, Stephen hawking is one. It is good to have this well-documented and immensely readable biography to remind us that the media-hyped mute genius in the wheelchair is in fact a sensitive, humorous, ambitious and occasionally wilful human being.
-Paul Davies in the Times Higher Education Supplement

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgement

The Day Galileo Died
Classical Cosmology
Going Up
Doctors and Doctorates
From Black Holes to the Big Bang
Marriage and Fellowship
Singular Solutions
The Breakthrough Years
When Black Holes Explode
The Foothills of Fame
Back to the Beginning
Science Superstardom
When the Universe has Babies
A Brief History of Time
The End of Physics?
Hollywood, Fame and Fortune

References

Index