Book Review: Black Holes and Baby Universes

Here’s my one-word review of Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays by Stephen Hawking:

What?

That shouldn’t be too surprising if you consider that a) I’m not a stupidly smart theoretical physisist, and b) Hawking doesn’t really try to make the material in this collection of essays accessible to anyone else. Actually, there’s some stuff near the beginning that’s autobiographical, which I found interesting (fun fact: despite being stricken with the crippling Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Hawking got married and had children, not to mention that incredible career). And there was some general stuff about public attitudes about science that I followed fine, even if it did veer off into babbling on about nuclear proliferation.

But then things got wonky and Hawking was talking about subatomic thingamabobs and celestial-sized thingamajiggers. I’d try to pay attention and follow along, but usually my mind wandered off and I got good and lost. And going back to try to find out where I got lost felt too little like reading and too much like studying. The problem is that this seems to be a quick cash grab of a book comprised of various essays and speeches that Hawking gave to various professional societies and conventions. He’s not really trying too hard to speak to me, even in that suave robotic voice of his. So I’m out of my element and he’s just standing there (well, sitting) and not really trying to show me around. So a good read it was not.

My guess is that something like his A Brief History of Time or The Universe in a Nutshell may be less problematic in this way, since they were written from the ground up to be mainstream. But given what I see here I kind of wonder.