Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north London, but during the second world war Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies. When he was eight, his family moved to St Albans, a town about 20 miles north of London. At eleven Stephen went to St Albans School, and then on to University College, Oxford, his father's old college. Stephen wanted to do Mathematics, although his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he did Physics instead. After three years and not very much work he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science. At the same time, it takes several days to get enough data to get a clear picture over a long period. So it’s an enormous task that takes place over years and years. There’s an old saying I think by Stephen Hawking that every equation you include in a popular level science book will half the effective book sales. Well, Cox and Forshaw deserve credit for taking a brave plunge (and by my estimate forgoing 99.999999% of their book sales based on Hawking’s formula) because one of the highlights of this book is the scattering of equations that are accompanied by careful explanation and insight. While saying this, I think the authors try their best to convey these complex ideas to the layman. I have read considerable amount of books about the universe and this is the hardest so far. But even though this it's hard to read, I think we can see through these theories from a mathematical point of view. Because at the end of the day it's all about maths. A singularity is what you end up with when a giant star is compressed to an unimaginably small point."

Also, as a reader who is not using these texts for any academic purposes, I think Cox’s writing is so much easier to ‘digest’ (and much more enjoyable in general) than Hawking’s (only comparing this to a few of Hawking’s books that I’ve previously read). I think it might be important to clarify that – I’m not comparing them based on ‘who’s the better (astro)physicist’ or whose ‘work’ was more ‘important’; but only of whose writing/books I had found more ‘enjoyable’. Hope that helps?

Quantum mechanics implies that the whole space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles, which are constantly materializing in pairs, separating, and then coming together again and annihilating each other.

You can learn about Einstein and how Einstein was the first to think about reality differently and how that led him to write his theory of relativity and everything. The author closes this book with a chapter on his philosophical view concerning science and humanity. The authors try to describe the spacetime by something called Penrose diagrams. I think I did a good job understanding it to some extent. But when it came to quantum entanglement in the last chapters, I kind of gave up. Because the equations involved with those chapters were more complex than the rest. Reality Is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli, translators: Simon Carnell, and Erica Segre. Call Number: Shields Library QC178 .R69313 2017 The first sign I was wrong is when I noticed a myriad of Penrose diagrams throughout the book - that is not something I’ve see in popular science books before. Sometimes you will get spacetime diagrams and usually very simple ones at that. As someone who studied physics 20 years ago as an undergraduate (and took a subject on relativity) I can honestly say I’d never seen a Penrose diagram before and I found them a really useful learning tool in the book. As I said, I’ve read a lot of books on this topic and adjacent ones (Thorne, Greene, Smolin, Carrol, etc) and I was genuinely glued to this one. Telescopes can get a clearer, more tense image of something in outer space. If multiple telescopes worldwide work in unison, looking at the same thing, they can compare the data and get a much-sharpened image. That’s what researchers are attempting to do. It’s a massive task as weather patterns are different in different parts of the world that meet ideal conditions at these different telescopes.

Stephen Hawking discusses a grand unified theory in a brief history of time. The idea behind a grand unified theory is that laws can connect general relativity and quantum mechanics. It is also sometimes called the theory of everything. I suppose owning a “Schrödinger’s cat: Wanted dead and alive” t-shirt didn’t actually qualify me to understand this book (although it certainly increased my nerd cred). Gubser and Pretorius offer clarity on a difficult topic, with a healthy dose of wonder to boot."— Publishers Weekly All of this disregards entirely that I am already sort of tied up with a pseudo-career in a different scientific discipline and do not relish the thought of attending university again. Nor am I particularly skilled at focussing on multiple things, fond of starting over, or withholding anything of value from the theoretical physicists that they haven't already got covered. Neil Tyson is one of the greatest scientific educators we have ever had. He is probably unmatched when writing popular science books, where he covers topics that can be very counterintuitive. But he explains astrophysics very smoothly that anybody can understand without scientific knowledge.