Stephen Hawking. A Life in Science

John Gribbin

• 9780670840137

Samenvatting:

Holder of Newton's chair at Cambridge, Professor Stephen Hawking has become the most famous physicist end arguably the most famous scientist, since Einstein. His work on black holes, the big bang, and quantum cosmology, has guarenteed his reputation among physicists, but it is his extraordinary survival through twenty-five years of living with motor-neurone disease and the phenomenal success of his book A Brief History of Time that have made his name and face familiar to a wider public. In this book, the first biography of Hawking, journalist Michael White and acclaimed science writer John Gribbin, tell the story of Hawking's life and work, his childhood and earlky scientific promise at school, his days at Oxford, his marriage and the early signs of desaese, through to his professorship at Cambridge and the successof A Brief History of Time. The book explains the importance of his scientific work in chapters that discuss the physics that Hawking would have learned at school and university. Newtonian mechanics, Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics, the major contribution he has made to our understanding of the early history of the universe, the big bang and black holes and his highly productive collaborations with Roger Penrose. It also looks forward to the achievement of physics' holy grail, a 'theory of everything', a theory that, if found in our lifetimes, will be substantially bases on Hawking's own work. Gribbin and White explore the man, the scientist and his science, making the importance of his scientific achievements accesible and clear and showing how he has not only survived a crippling disease but reached the top of his profession despite it.