BRIEF ANSWERS TO THE BIG QUESTIONS (B PB )

I have chosen a career of Theoretical Physics not randomly but because of my intense curiosity of knowing about this universe in an abstract way since I was born. I am a 15 year old and I found this book by Sir Stephen Hawking a true interesting and easy to read if you understand astrophysics and having questions stuck in your mind mentioned behind and in the index of this book. From the foreword from Eddie Redmayne to the last question 'Will Artificial Intelligence outsmart us?' I found every detailed of this book. If you're calling this book boring you may have not understood it. Well looking for more books from the same author and related to Theoretical Physics. Thank you for reading the review

In past few years this is the only book I finished very quickly. Felt like having one on one lecture with Dr. Hawking.

Published posthumously, this book brings together Stephen Hawking’s final thoughts on ten of the most profound questions we face. His daughter, Lucy Hawking, and the Stephen Hawking Estate were closely involved in shaping this collection, ensuring it reflects his voice and vision. This is Stephen Hawking’s final message to the world — a collection of ten essays tackling some of the most pressing and profound issues of our time. The chapters span a wide range of topics: from the existence of God and the future of artificial intelligence, to whether time travel is possible and how we might survive as a species. What makes the book compelling is Hawking’s ability to engage with such heavy questions without losing sight of his audience. He never talks down to the reader, yet he rarely lets the science become impenetrable. Two chapters especially stood out to me. Chapter 1, where he addresses the question “Is there a God?”, is striking for its clarity and honesty. While he’s respectful in tone and careful not to ruffle religious feathers unnecessarily, he is still frank and direct in stating his views. And Chapter 5, on black holes, is probably the most accessible and elegant explanation of the subject I’ve come across. Hawking distills decades of research into a few pages of crisp, often witty, insight. That said, despite Hawking’s efforts to simplify concepts and keep a touch of humour throughout, the book does get a bit dry at times — an understandable challenge given the complexity of the material. Some chapters are simply more engaging than others. Still, this book is a wonderful parting gift — a thoughtful, accessible summary of how Stephen Hawking saw the universe, our role in it, and the questions that should drive us forward. Highly recommended for anyone curious about science, philosophy, or the future of humanity. Pros: Ambitious questions, clearly explained science, and Hawking’s trademark curiosity. Cons: Occasional dry stretches and uneven pacing across chapters.

The book is a collection of answers given by the man with such a beautiful heart and very innovative and creative brain. His answers and the reasoning to it are really insightful. The ways in which things can be seen and perceived are delightful to know. Will recommend

When it comes about Hawking's book I always get so excited. Hawking being suffered from ALS, nevertheless he brought cosmology to the home of a reader and acquired a special position in the reader's heart. This issue of Stephen Hawking comes with answering the basic and most profound question that humanity has been striving to achieve the perfect answer since we parted our ways from apes. I loved this book as I want to become a cosmologist and my I inspiration is Stephen Hawking. And not only that but I also loved this book because it helped me to get a abound knowledge about our domain (i.e earth) and our place in the observable universe. Hawking has covered most significant part of our common debate from existence of God to the black holes and beneficialness of artificial intelligence

kudos to the seller he kept extra care in packaging the product and i felt like my own brother has packed and sent it to me as a gift and not as an order. if this review gets posted i would like to thank the seller for making this book a special order . and wish u succeed more and make book lovers happy just like u made me. ------ coming onto the book got the original copy . the book has a few repetitions from the old ones but thats okay its the last work and that too posthumously from sir stephen hawking . i could connect well to the author being an atheist and trying to find the similar answers but i beg to differ from him abt taking our species to other planets for its survival . rest its good to read him always. i derive inspiration from him.

Just as another Stephan hawkings book great as ever

I won’t say it’s the best in his books but because it’s gonnna be the last so i bought it to get to know where exactly his mind was wondering. Book just elaborated few metaphysical answers and few universal updates. It also includes kinda his whole enchanting carrier about how he started his science life and his college life, Oxford selection, scholarships. Book certainly mentions his famous questions as ‘Does God exist?’ , ‘is there any alien life’, ‘how things started at the beginning’. Although book doesn’t include Physics or mathematics in details towards any logical plateau but what it does is an overview of semi-logical chunk of thoughts that drive our universe.

Good book

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!

Todos los libros de stephen hawking son fáciles de leer de entender y entretenidos, excelente autor de mis favoritos

خدمة بغاية السوء

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.