The Illustrated A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded Edition

great book

The book is very nice,and have detail information about space-time, universe,quantum physics and many more. I love this book. Delivery was on time. Thanks Amazon.

A perfect option for a gift. The narration is extremely easy to follow, the illustrations help a lot to understand the physical concepts described. A slightly bit outdated, yes, but on everything in physics up to 20th century is extremely accurate. Una opción perfecta para un regalo. La narración es muy fácil de seguir, las ilustraciones ayudan mucho a entender los conceptos físicos descritos. Un poco poco anticuado, sí, pero sobre todo en la física hasta siglo 20 es extremadamente precisa.

La calidad es muy buena en impresión y encuadernado, había visto algunas ediciones con relieve en la pasta pero esta sólo lo tiene en el lomo, llegó en buenas condiciones. En general bonito. El contenido es obviamente excelente.

It's an amazing book. Stephen Hawking is a remarkable personality who thrives for knowledge to understand how our Universe is built, why are we here and where did we come from.He is not only a brilliant scientist but a philosopher who strongly believes that we've been given an opportunity to explore the World around us and try to read the language of Nature. The content of the book will challenge our very perception of the surrounding world, how we see objects, our sense of time. It will show how huge (or small), complex and beautiful is our Universe, how much progress the mankind have done in revealing it's secrets and there is still a long way to discover it all. It's a short book but be prepared to re-read every page, so you understand better what S.Hawking is trying to explain there. All those complex ideas he put for us in a simplest possible way with nice illustrations, with no mathematical formulas or scary geometrical drawings. If you want to get a sense of how far we've got with understanding of our World, have a light touch of a matter the top physicists of the world are dealing with every day, if you want to bug your mind with even more questions (but questions will become more interesting, more advanced), then this book is for you.

For anyone looking for a great, comprehensible explanation of the current state of the theories driving today's physics, this is it. Hawking has taken everything from the early history of thinking about the universe, its laws and composition, to the latest developments on black holes and string theory and placed it in a remarkably lucid set of explanations that detail the concepts behind all the mathematics that is so intimidating to most. This book is written without a single equation or a single statement on the order of "From the above, it is obvious that..." Instead, we proceed from the (comparatively) simple concepts about the everyday observable world of gravity, planets, and stars, travel carefully along the historical path of scientific observations as they modify and enhance the simple theories till we reach the world of quantum mechanics, the big bang, wormholes, and Grand Unified Field Theories. Each concept is fully explained, and with this expanded second edition, many of the concepts are beautifully illustrated with drawings and photographs. And, possibly surprising to some people, as we enter the rarified air of today's theories, we see that the line between physics and philosophy is a very thin one, and ruminations about the origin of the Universe lead to discussions about God and fate. Here we see why Hawking is one of the premier physicists of today, as he obviously thinks in same kind of conceptual language that this book is written in, capable of looking at the meaning behind the mathematics and how it relates to us as humans. Physics students and engineers may not find very much new here, but even they may benefit from the clear thought lines presented here, forcing a look at the meaning behind all the esoteric symbols that are their everyday working fare. About the only quibble I had with this was Hawking's insistence on writing out very large/small numbers as million-million-million... While this was fine the first couple of times it becomes a little irritating in place of the standard 1,000,000... representation, or even better to use standard scientific notation. A great elucidation of some of the most complex theories of the day, theories seemingly unrelated to your everyday life, but which are in fact the bedrock upon which today's technological marvels are based, and with implications that catch the nether regions of religion and the questions we all have about the meaning of life and the universe.