Brief Answers to the Big Questions Paperback – Large Print, November 13, 2018

I loved this book! Any fan of Hawking's work should enjoy it, for sure. I really liked the "pondering" and "musing" pace and feel. I'd recommend it to anyone.@Diane... Whenever I encounter something to which I feel the need to respond, I’m usually pretty good at keeping my emotions at bay, and I sincerely try to (and, usually do) keep my cool, put myself into the other person’s shoes and think about my rebuttals logically. Over the years I’ve always felt a little guilty because, even though I’m amicable and nice most of the time, I just feel bad when I make someone else feel bad, regardless of how correct I might feel that I am. After seeing your comment, however, I really have to say congratulations… you’ve convinced me that I really shouldn’t be so hard on myself.Pathetic? I guess our definitions are a tad juxtaposed. I've always taken that word to mean "causing or evoking pity, sympathetic sadness, or sorrow." It baffles me that you can throw the book at another human being, (one who had PLENTY of reasons to wallow in self-pity, mind you, but didn't) simply for disagreeing with you, and do so under the guise of "defending yourself," all the while implying a whine that these disagreements are an "attack" on your religion. To me, THAT is the self-pity party that fits more in line with the definition of "pathetic," wouldn't you agree? Scientific discoveries are no more responsible for attacking religion, or having a motive or agenda to remove your belief in God, than learning about gravity is responsible for children eventually coming to the conclusion that reindeer can’t fly. I’m sorry, Virginia, but we lied. I don’t know if you just simply can’t grasp how it appears to the outside world, but your comment does nothing more than make you look like a petulant toddler in a tantrum because you can’t have any ice cream, and THEN taking all of the ice cream and flushing it down the toilet to make sure no one else can have any. If the weather man conveys some data that it is probably going to rain tomorrow, do you start a revolution to rise up against the hidden agenda of meteorology to wipe the concept of picnics off the face of the Earth? Of course not, that would be ridiculous, right?Stephen Hawking was a brilliant man. He contributed so much to his field of science and had a genuine concern for the progression and well-being of humanity as a whole. I would honestly love to see your list of contributions toward bettering mankind. I have the sneaking suspicion that it would be just like mine, "pathetic." Have you actually read Hawking's work? Have you ever actually read any physics book? This is a problem in so many other areas of life and society, where someone knows “just enough to be dangerous.” You are a perfect example of this idiom in action, and your comment is perfectly indicative of someone learning what 2+2 is and then feeling they can successfully argue the elements of General or Special Relativity.You can’t berate atheists, or any nonbeliever for that matter, for being intelligent or knowledgeable about any topic, when you refuse to educate yourself with information that is freely available to, and very easily obtained by, anyone. Hearing someone whine that “you atheist’s just think that you’re sooooo smart,” gets old, really quickly. The real irony of it is that, compared to you, that statement admittedly holds some water. But as a general rule, there is nothing that you couldn’t understand yourself if you would quite simply take the time to learn about it. Instead of pointing and laughing at these ridiculous nonbelievers running around and learning stuff, I’d suggest that you push yourself way out of your comfort zone sometime and actually give it a try. You might surprise yourself.Look, all condescension aside, I know you have your beliefs. I know, from your perspective, Hawking is an expression of the things you feel are chipping away the the moral fabric of this world. You unknowingly got an honorary induction to my short list today, and with all of the misinformation I’ve seen lately, you just happened to be the lucky straw that broke the camel’s back, and for that, I’m sorry. I’m not going to change any of this, because I can’t lie and say I didn’t mean what I said, because I did. But, believe it or not, I do care about you and your position. And even though I’m an atheist, I very much want to live in a world where people can have faith and conviction about anything they want without having to prove it to the entire flippin' planet in order to feel justified in feeling the way they do, and more importantly, not condemn others for thinking differently. I’m not convinced that God exists, but if you are, then right on. I mean, I get it man, I used to be a Christian myself. You shouldn’t feel threatened by the world because it seems like it’s trying to take something away from you that you know full well cannot ever be taken from you. Let’s try to get this ship turned around and start acting like the amazing creatures we really are by helping each other move forward, instead of tearing each other down and holding up progress for the sake of making a point.The man who wrote this book did his part, now let's get out there and start doing ours. We can do this.I loved this book. Rest in peace, Stephen.

I am a big fan of Stephen Hawking, but it seems this book was rushed through. On Page 73 looks like who ever wrote this, does not have any idea about the structure of DNA. It says the two Chains in the helix are linked by nucleic acids and further mentions that there are four types of nucleic acids- adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine; these are actually called as bases. While as the actual nucleic acids are deoxribonucleic acid (DNA) and Ribinucleic acid(RNA).Also negative 270.4 degree Centigrade is equal to negative 454.7 degree F.

"There is no God. No one directs the universe," he writes in "Brief Answers to the Big Questions.""For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God," he adds. "I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature."

As a teenager with good grades in maths and science at school, "a brief history of time" seriously rocked my brain and made me fall in love with physics in the late 80s. Currently I hold a master's degree in physics and I am now in my mid 40s. I am thankful to Prof Hawkings for once again creating this masterpiece where he has summarized his life long research into a book so easy to understand and appreciate.Set your mind free and travel through the grand cosmic time and space as Prof Hawkings reveals answers to puzzles and paradoxes set to us by our universe. Does he have THE ANSWER? Maybe not but you can't go wrong getting some insights into the mind of one of the greatest pioneer in physics of our lifetime.

I don't know who actually wrote this book because it is a pure rambling of personal thoughts mixed with facts from all over literature and mixed with pure fiction. This book brings nothing to the reader. I know most of Hawking's previous work which was coherent but this book is completely different, hence my question mark on who actually wrote it.It seems more a last attempt to profit from Hawking's name.Highly not recommended !

This book collects the scientific thoughts and evidence-based conclusions from one of the most rational and gifted minds in the recorded history of human kind. Although the book maintains the same super engaging and impressive narrative of previous books by Dr. Hawking, this ones converges specifically on his science-based conclusions about the “big questions”. He again makes his thoughts appear intuitive and simple, yet they come from the one of the most objective, impartial, rational and brilliant scientific minds the human race has ever produced.

Ten short essays addressing perhaps the most fundamental questions of our era. Each is addressed with profound wisdom and great clarity. Fact is clearly separated from opinion, and the opinions are presented with respect. Writing a book as good as this would be a crowning lifetime achievement for many of us. That it was a relatively lightweight spinoff from his real work underscores his genius.

Bought this book not expecting much from it. Ended up being pleasantly surprised. Hawking has a way of explaining even the most complex things in a very simple, no nonsense, and straightforward manner.

Interesting answers to some of the regular questions people ask. Brief enough to maintain interest but provided well rounded and thoughtful arguments to support views.

Stephen Hawking was a professor at Cambridge University, and arguably the most famous scientist since Einstein. In Brief Answers to the Big Questions he writes:Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful…What came before the Big Bang? According to the no-boundary proposal, asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless – like asking what is south of the South Pole – because there is no notion of time available to refer to. The concept of time only exists within our universe…Why haven’t we been visited by alien forms of life? Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy – or in the observable universe – on which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self-reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence. We are used to thinking of intelligent life as an inevitable consequence of evolution, but what if it isn’t? It is not even clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value. Bacteria, and other single-cell organisms, may live on if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions…Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus – and I don’t think they thought they were better off for it…What is the biggest threat to the future of this planet? An asteroid collision would be, a threat against which we have no defence. But the last big such asteroid collision was about sixty-six million years ago and killed the dinosaurs. A more immediate danger is runaway climate change. A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade (482 degrees Fahrenheit)…When an artificial intelligence (AI) becomes better than humans at AI design, so that it can recursively improve itself without human help, we may face an intelligence explosion that ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails. When that happens, we will need to ensure that the computers have goals aligned with ours…In his book Life 3.0, MIT professor Max Tegmark warns that this alignment is not an easy task:“Suppose a bunch of ants create you to be a recursively self-improving robot, much smarter than them, who shares their goals and helps build bigger and better anthills, and that you eventually attain the human-level intelligence and understanding that you have now. Do you think you’ll spend the rest of your days just optimizing anthills, or do you think you might develop a taste for more sophisticated questions and pursuits that the ants have no ability to comprehend? If so, do you think you’ll find a way to override the ant-protection urge that your formicine creators endowed you with, in much the same way that the real you overrides some of the urges your genes have given you?And in that case, might a superintelligent friendly AI find our current human goals as uninspiring and vapid as you find those of the ants, and evolve new goals different from those it learned and adopted from us?Perhaps there’s a way of designing a self-improving AI that’s guaranteed to retain human-friendly goals forever, but I think it’s fair to say that we don’t yet know how to build one – or even whether it’s possible.”Hawking extends the analogy:A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydro-electric green-energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants…On whether or not God exists, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) have said it all. And for more extended discussions on the best solutions to climate change, Stanford professor Mark Jacobson is to be recommended. For his part, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom has discussed the dangers of AI in detail in his book Superintelligence.But if what you want is Brief Answers to the Big Questions, this is the book!

I can trace my interest in science to Professor Hawking. His 90s appearance on Star Trek provided the bridge between SciFi and real science through books like A Brief History of time. Although now that science is more accessible in a generation with NDT and a small army of passionate YouTubers, there really isn’t anything in the book that anyone already familiar with his work wouldn’t expect.But still, highly informative, extremely accessible and a great deal of fun to read.

The book can be a difficult read at times if you have no interest or knowledge of physics. I had minimal knowledge and I loved this book.

From one of the astrophysics worlds greatest minds comes another fascinating encapsulation of the staggeringly advanced topics his brain explored and navigated. This book just radiates with optimism and knowledge in a way I can only euphemistically describe as another form of “Hawking Radiation”. I wish there could be more from this icon of physics, the universe and I will miss his mind.