The Universe in a Nutshell attempts to address the relative difficulty of Hawking's first foray into popular science, A Brief History of Time. While this sold in its millions, few readers got past the first few chapters. Helpfully, this new work is full of beautifully prepared colour illustrations and decorations, and has a "tree-like" structure, so that readers can skip from chapter to chapter without losing the thread.

In 200 highly illustrated pages, Hawking is pushing the frontiers of popular physics beyond relativity and quantum theory, past superstring theory and imaginary time, into a dizzying new world of M-theory and branes. It's a colossal venture--one Hawking is uniquely qualified to undertake--but it is crammed into far too small a space. When you consider the other rather good tomes being written on the nature of consciousness these days, the decision to limit The Universe in a Nutshell to the dictates of publishing rather than to the natural parameters of the material is an unfortunate one.

Worse, Hawking tries to paper over the complexity of his field. He rushes over the very concepts he should be helping us understand, only to belabour simple ideas, often by means of flip Star Trek metaphors. Also unfortunately, the illustrations--by turns trivial and opaque--mirror the faults of the text. The author's name alone will guarantee sales, but the book we long for--the long, ruminative, poetic celebration of Hawking's world--seems as far away as ever. --Simon Ings

2008-07-24 Very good book, but a bit hard to understand

Before I read this book, I have finished A Briefer History of Time also by Stephen Hawking. Therefore, I have had a general idea of time and relativity already.

I found University in a Nutshell is much harder to understand comparing with the A Briefer History of Time. The knowledge introduced in the book is much deeper and I counldn't understand much of it. I have got a master degree in microelectronics, if I got problem to understand I think many other people will have the same problem.

Hawking is trying to introduce the knowledge using non-mathematical ways. It is well illustrated, however, I think it is a bit over illustrated. I found many of the illustrations are redundant such as Einstein's photos and some other diagram isn't really helpful for readers to understand the knowledge which is written by word.

Generally speaking, it is still a very good book. It covers quite a lot of knoledge points such as black hole and etc. And it is quite a fun to read.