Breif answer to big question summary of this book and writer name.
Answers
Answer:
stephen hawking
Explanation:
'Brief Answers To The Big Questions' Is Stephen Hawking's Parting Gift To Humanity The physicist's posthumous book highlights his belief in the rationality of nature and in our ability to uncover its secrets — and a faith in science's ability to solve humanity's biggest problems.
Stephen Hawking’s final book: a review of Brief Answers to the Big Questions
16 Oct 2018 Matin Durrani
Photo of the cover of Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking
Final effort: Brief Answers to the Big Questions has been completed after Stephen Hawking’s death
Publishers are normally so desperate to have their new books reviewed that they’ll bombard newspapers, websites and magazines with unsolicited pre-publication copies to garner coverage when the titles are launched. Just look at the Physics World filing cabinet: it’s full of books we didn’t ask for but were sent on spec by publicity-hungry publishers. With Stephen Hawking’s latest – and final – book, however, something very different happened.
To get a preview of Brief Answers to the Big Questions, which is released today, the publishers John Murray made Physics World jump through various hoops. Having done so, I was expecting great things of the book – and I can imagine many readers will too.
Hawking’s first popular-science book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than 25 million copies since it came out 30 years ago and every further title he’s written since then has been a publishing sensation. His latest book is bound to be huge too. Indeed, I can imagine a cottage industry of “lost” or unfinished Hawking books and papers being published for decades, just as they have with the works of that other great superstar physicist Richard Feynman.
Hawking was still working on Brief Answers to the Big Questions when he died last March. To fill the gaps, the publishers decided to draw on Hawking’s “enormous personal archive” of responses he’d given as speeches, interviews, essays and articles to the many questions people had asked him. The book was then completed in collaboration with “his academic colleagues, his family and the Stephen Hawking Estate”. A percentage of the royalties are earmarked for the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the Stephen Hawking Foundation.
So what of the book itself? It’s divided into 10 chapters, each posing a different question. Three are open-ended: “What is inside a black hole?”, “How did it all begin?” and “How do we shape the future?”. The other seven are all yes/no questions, such as “Is there a God?”, “Is time travel possible?” and “Will we survive on Earth?”, all of which seduce the reader into thinking there will be easy answers. Except, as you might expect, it’s not that straightforward.
Take the chapter on “Can we predict the future?”. Starting with regular astronomical events, it swiftly moves on to scientific determinism, quantum physics, hidden variables and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Under the guise of a simple question, Hawking has managed to take the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the quantum world (bottom line: no we can’t predict everything). It’s a clever ruse. Ask a simple question and you’ll draw in readers who might otherwise not know they’d be interested in complex science.