The Theory Of Everything by Stephen Hawking
This book is a transcription of several lectures Stephen Hawking gave sometime before 1996. He does not own the copyright to these lectures, and would prefer that people who are interested in his work instead consult the books that he has written himself.
Ironically, of the books by Hawking that I've tried, this is really the most enjoyable to me. Partly this may be because the lecture format required a particular kind of conciseness that his books lack. I have been listening to the book on audio as well as reading it. The audio version is, apparently, a direct recording of his lectures, and is given by means of his speech synthesizer. This is interesting and quite intelligible, although some proper names have odd pronunciations. I completed only the first three chapters, described below.
Chapter 1: Ideas about the Universe
Aristotle and the many reasons for a spherical earth, as well as an over-estimate of its circumference. The methods were good, but the instruments weren't so accurate.
Ptolemy's model requires the moon's distance from the earth to vary considerably. This contradicts observed fact, as the apparent size of the moon does not change as much as it would under these circumstances.
Copernicus's theory is introduced and ignored until Galileo and Kepler take it up. Kepler discovers that the orbits of the planets are ellipses and is dissatisfied. Galileo investigates the moons of Jupiter. Newton publishes the Principia and speculates about an infinite universe, in order to account for the fact that gravity does not draw all the stars together into a single lump.
This book is a transcription of several lectures Stephen Hawking gave sometime before 1996. He does not own the copyright to these lectures, and would prefer that people who are interested in his work instead consult the books that he has written himself.
Ironically, of the books by Hawking that I've tried, this is really the most enjoyable to me. Partly this may be because the lecture format required a particular kind of conciseness that his books lack. I have been listening to the book on audio as well as reading it. The audio version is, apparently, a direct recording of his lectures, and is given by means of his speech synthesizer. This is interesting and quite intelligible, although some proper names have odd pronunciations. I completed only the first three chapters, described below.
Chapter 1: Ideas about the Universe
Aristotle and the many reasons for a spherical earth, as well as an over-estimate of its circumference. The methods were good, but the instruments weren't so accurate.
Ptolemy's model requires the moon's distance from the earth to vary considerably. This contradicts observed fact, as the apparent size of the moon does not change as much as it would under these circumstances.
Copernicus's theory is introduced and ignored until Galileo and Kepler take it up. Kepler discovers that the orbits of the planets are ellipses and is dissatisfied. Galileo investigates the moons of Jupiter. Newton publishes the Principia and speculates about an infinite universe, in order to account for the fact that gravity does not draw all the stars together into a single lump.
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