The Grand Design By Stephen Hawking

About the Authors:

Stephen Hawking is a theoretical physicist who worked for 30 years as a Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge. His research focused mostly on theoretical cosmology, especially black holes. Besides that Stephen Hawking has become widely known for his popular science books like “A Brief History of Time”, “Universe in a Nutshell” and others.

Leonard Mlodinov is a physicist and an author. He works in Caltech and Max Planck Institute for physics. His research focuses on various problems of Quantum Mechanics. Besides that he also wrote screenplays for Beyond the Horizon and Star Trek the Next Generation.

Short Review of the Book:

The Grand Design is the newest book of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov which focuses on explaining the origins of the universe. In this new book Hawking expresses his position that laws of the universe alone are enough to explain the Big Bang, that is, God as a creation of the universe is not necessary. This as you might guess has caused a little controversy, especially among the religious readers.

The aim of this book is to show how laws of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics can lead to the spontaneous creation of the universe from nothing. The authors start by describing the evolution of human thought and science and how this lead to the current understanding of the universe. Starting with ancient Greek scholars and revolutionary works on Nicolaus Copernicus , ending with modern M-theory – authors show how centuries of scientific knowledge help us tackle the greatest mysteries of the universe.  

You can find the book here:

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So You Want to Learn Physics (The Fun Way)

These days when internet is easily accessible, it's easy to learn anything you like from home. Internet, being the biggest virtual library, gives you an opportunity to learn various science fields as well. Today I will show you some nice books that you can easily find on the internet. These books helped me to learn various subjects an get better at high school.

If you want to learn physics you should start from simple high school level physics, however there are some very nice books, which can teach you the basics of quantum mechanics, string theory, general and special theories of relativity and other.

There's a very nice book about time travel, which covers many aspects of general relativity, special relativity, quantum mechanics and some history of physics. This book is called Black Holes Wormholes and Time Machines by Jim Al-Khalili. It's a simple to read book that contains basically no maths, so it can be read by anyone.

Another great book for those, who want to learn the basics of modern physics is Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. This book also covers the basics of Einstein's theories, quantum mechanics and some history of physics. The main focus of the book is string theory.

After reading these books, you could find Stephen Hawking's books useful. The most popular of his books are The Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell.  Both of the books cover a wide range of physics subjects, are easy to read and contain some valuable knowledge.

The series of books called For Dummies contain a lot of useful books, basically about anything. You can find many useful books like The String Theory for Dummies, Physics for Dummies and so on.  I highly recommend these books for starters, because they're easy to use and contain all that a starter needs.

Well that's it for now. Thanks for reading. I hope these books, will be useful for you. Please subscribe or follow my blog if you like it.

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