Brief Answers to the Big Questions is a popular - science book written by physicist Stephen Hawking. The book examines some of the universe's greatest mysteries, and promotes the view that science is very important in helping to solve problems on planet Earth. According to me he is the greatest physicist of our generation.
The book is a selection of [Hawking's] most profound, accessible, and timely reflections from his personal archive. The book was incomplete at the time of Hawking passing in March 2018, but was completed with “his academic colleagues, his family and the Stephen Hawking Estate”.
The book is divided into four sections: "Why Are We Here? Will We Survive? Will Technology Save Us or Destroy Us? How Can We Thrive?"
The ten big questions that are considered include: Is there a God? How did it all begin? What is inside a black hole? Can we predict the future? Is time travel possible? Will we survive on Earth? Is there other intelligent life in the universe? Should we colonise space? Will artificial intelligence outsmart us? How do we shape the future?
The book discusses many of today's challenges, including the biggest threat to the planet (an "asteroid collision", like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago ... "we have no defense” against that, climate change (“a rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide ... [making] our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250 °C (482 °F)"), the threat of nuclear war ("at some point in the next 1,000 years, nuclear war or environmental calamity will 'cripple Earth'"), nuclear power ("that would give us clean energy with no pollution or global warming"), the development of artificial intelligence (AI) (“in the future AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours”) and humans ("a genetically-modified race of superhumans, say with greater memory and disease resistance, would imperil the others").
The book also discusses the "big questions", including life ("in the next 50 years, we will come to understand how life began and possibly discover whether life exists elsewhere in the universe"), time (“You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang ... If the concept of time only exists within our universe and the universe came to be spontaneously ... and with it, brought time into existence, there’s simply no 'before' to consider." Further, Hawking believed the universe could reach an end point, either through an eventual cosmic "crunch or an expansion" ... "In the interim ... We are all time travelers, journeying together into the future. But let us make that future a place we want to visit”), the possibility of time travel (“asking if time travel is possible is a 'very serious question' that our current understanding cannot rule out"), and God (“knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature ... My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century” further, "if you like, you can call the laws of science ‘God,’ but it wouldn’t be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to ... [nevertheless] the simplest explanation is that God does not exist and there is no reliable evidence for an afterlife, though people could live on through their influence and genes").
According to Hawking in the book, education and science are "in danger now more than ever before", and urged young people "to look up at the stars and not down at your feet ... Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist ... It matters that you don't give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.
The unifying theme across the book, is Hawking's deep faith in science's ability to solve humanity's biggest problems and his answers to the big questions illustrate his belief in the rationality of nature and on our ability to uncover all its secrets.
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