Published after Hawking’s death, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions” is a poignant final note in the cosmologist’s life. Hawking was working on this book when he passed, so it was completed in collaboration with his family and academic colleagues. The chapters within each ask a “big question” about time travel, the beginning of the universe, aliens, black holes, and more.

The answers were compiled from a massive archive of Hawking’s essays, speeches, and replies to when other people had asked him those same big questions. Because of this, I found this book to be more easily digestible than other books of Hawking’s I’ve read. Each chapter was self-contained, and answered in a way that drilled directly to the core of the question rather than lollygag around the tangents until the reader is so lost that they have forgotten what they originally asked. Because Hawking’s descriptions and explanations have sometimes been taken from speeches he made, they are necessarily simplified, which makes them easier to understand. This is probably helped also by the fact that other people helped to compile this work and thus there was a built in filter between Hawking’s mind and the reader’s.

If you have read others of Hawking’s works, you will find much of the same information repeated here, but this is not a criticism. Rather, I quite enjoyed reading the condensed versions of the topics that Hawking spent his life researching. It made clear what he found to be the most critical points. Because the book is quite short, only the most important questions and angles of those questions could be explored. This kept the book engaging and moving where other books of his may have felt stuck in the weeds.

I also quite enjoyed the snippets of actual Hawking audio included in the audiobook. After each chapter, a female asker poses the “big question” from the chapter to Hawking, who answers it in a few sentences in his own words.

I’ve said it before, but the world is missing a great mind.

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Created May 28, 2019 at 4:01pm • Submit your own review...