The recap
Stephen Hawking wanted to bring the deepest questions in physics to people who had never studied it: Where did the universe come from? Will it end? What is time, and why does it seem to run only one way? In short, lively chapters he leads readers from early ideas about the heavens through Newton and Einstein to the expanding universe, the Big Bang and the strange behavior of black holes, a subject at the heart of his own research. He also explains the uneasy relationship between relativity and quantum mechanics, and why physicists keep searching for a single theory that could unite them. Hawking keeps mathematics almost entirely off the page, relying instead on analogies, diagrams and a dry, playful sense of humor. Some passages ask for slow and careful reading, but patient readers are rewarded with a real feel for how modern cosmologists think, and for how much is still unknown. The updated tenth-anniversary edition brings parts of the story closer to the present.
Why read it
For curious readers who want to grasp the big ideas of modern cosmology without equations, straight from one of the scientists who shaped them.
Fun facts
- 01
Hawking was warned that every equation he included would halve his readership, so he kept only one: E = mc².
- 02
It entered the Guinness Book of Records after an unmatched 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and in 2024 the Sunday Times ranked it first among the books on its chart over the previous 50 years.
- 03
The book has been translated into some 40 languages and has sold more than 10 million copies.
- 04
Errol Morris turned it into a 1991 documentary, scored by Philip Glass, that won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.
