Stephen Hawking’s purpose for writing “The Universe in a Nutshell” was to dumb it down a little from his previous book “A Brief History of Time” and explore more recent advances in his field. While he did succeed in consolidating the vast knowledge in his head, he failed to properly form the explanatory chain of logic that I needed to fully grasp the ideas he was presenting. The book itself was a lot shorter than his previous work, and in doing so, Hawking trimmed out all the detailed explanations that made “A Brief History of Time” so fascinating. By asking the reader to blindly trust him without presenting a clear explanation for how he came to that conclusion, I was left feeling confused and unsatisfied. For me, I want those longer explanations of how things work and why they make sense.

Don’t get me wrong – this book was fascinating in its own right. I was awed at Hawking’s mind and at the theories he presented, which did stretch my own concept of reality and force me to ponder huge concepts that had never been on my radar before. One of those concepts was the notion of a “P-Brane,” a higher dimensional object (up to 9 dimensions) related to String Theory. When the concept was first introduced in the audiobook, the narrator had to clarify the spelling to ensure the listener didn’t mistakenly think Hawking was calling them a “pea brain.” Nevertheless, despite the clarification, Hawking uses the phrase “P-Brane” so many times throughout the rest of the book, it really began to sink in for me like a sort of subliminal message. “You are a pea brain! You are a pea brain! You won’t ever understand because you’re a pea brain!” And trust me, I did feel that way.

This book was a brief skim over the surface with little meat and thus little for the reader to chew on. More times that I could count, I asked “how?” Hawking would reveal something I found interesting, but never give me a reason for why and how that came to be. This of course was necessitated by his endeavor to shorten his book and make it more digestible for the average audience, but I was unfortunately disappointed. These topics simply cannot be compressed into a nutshell as Hawking tries to do here. If anything, this book may put you off learning more because it fails to clearly present the theories in the way “A Brief History of Time” did so well. Unless you too would like Hawking to mock your intelligence from beyond the grave (pea brain!), I recommend skipping this one and taking the time to read his first book instead.

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Created Mar 10, 2019 at 9:42am • Submit your own review...