ISBN:0525934472Product Description
A biography of the world's most brilliant scientist discusses Hawking's childhood, his twenty-five year battle with Lou Gehrig's Disease, his celebrity, the breakup of his marriage, and his revolutionary theories on the origin of the universe. 20,000 first printing./p>
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
A Fascinating Story of a Man and His Ideas
Stephen Hawking A Life In Science by Michael White and John Gibbons does a fantastic job of combining both the story of Stephen Hawkings's life and in depth explanations of his scientific work and findings. The story of Hawking's life is told starting from his very early childhood and progress through his schooling and career. The book discusses the people and events in Hawking's early life that influenced him to work in the field of Cosmology. The book also addresses the discoveries and theories that Hawking developed in his studies. The theories are explained in plenty of detail but the authors do a good job in making them as easy to understand a possible. The story of Hawking's life itself is truly amazing because of the significant discoveries he made despite his disability. The book is worth while fro anyone who want s to learn about Stephen Hawking and wants to learn a bit about his discoveries and why they are significant. Although the authors do try to keep the explanations simple, there are some parts that are hard to understand without a decent knowledge of physic's principles. Even so, the book is still well written and the story it tells is fascinating.
Good biography of an incredible man
I am an enormous fan of Stephen Hawking, his achievements in physics are incredible and his ability to overcome his illness demonstrates how sturdy the human mind can be. He is touted in the book as the greatest mind since Einstein, which is a claim I also recently read concerning Richard Feynman. I have no opinion on this, as I hold them both in very high regard. To me such debates are silly, as ranking such people is so subjective that it is meaningless and wasteful.
That aside, I generally enjoyed the book, finding the explanations of the physics a little too simplistic for my tastes, but certainly within the realm of the general reader. My only real criticism is that there was too much ink spent on some of the minutiae of his life. Even Hawking probably objects to some of the details about his life that appear. However, I was pleased to read that he can be temperamental and shows his anger by running over a person's foot with his wheelchair. It just makes him sound that much more human.
This is a good biography of a great man, who lets nothing get in his way. An inspiration who probably does not want the role in any capacity other than as a physicist, he has revolutionized cosmology and it will be a minimum of decades before all the consequences of his work will be known.