The universe, from the Big Bang to black holes

There is a particular kind of courage in writing a book about the origin and fate of the universe and trusting that ordinary readers will come with you. Stephen Hawking did exactly that in 1988, when A Brief History of Time became an unlikely global phenomenon — a book about cosmology bought by millions of people who had never thought much about physics at all.

Hawking's central argument is that the universe had a beginning. Drawing on the work of Edwin Hubble, he shows that galaxies are rushing away from each other, which means that running the clock backwards brings everything to a single, unimaginably dense point. The Big Bang is not a hypothesis at the edge of science — it is the most rigorously tested account of how things started that we have.

Black holes occupy the book's heart. Hawking describes them as regions where gravity is so intense that nothing — not even light — can escape. His own contribution was to show mathematically that black holes are not entirely silent: they emit a faint radiation, now called Hawking radiation, which means they slowly lose energy and, given enough time, evaporate entirely.

Threading through all of this is a question Hawking returns to again and again: whether the laws of physics are inevitable, or whether they required something outside themselves to set them in motion. He does not settle the question. What he does instead is show you exactly why it matters — and why science, rather than closing down wonder, keeps opening it wider.