Who wrote A Brief History of Time?
Quick answer
A Brief History of Time was written by British physicist Stephen Hawking and published in 1988. It explains big questions about the universe, such as the Big Bang, black holes and the nature of time, for general readers. It became a worldwide bestseller, with more than 25 million copies sold in about 40 languages.
Key facts
- Author
- Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)
- Published
- 1988
- Subtitle
- From the Big Bang to Black Holes
- Copies sold
- More than 25 million
What the book covers
| Topic | Question it explores |
|---|---|
| The Big Bang | How did the universe begin? |
| Black holes | What happens to matter that falls in? |
| Time | Why does time seem to move in one direction? |
| Relativity and quantum theory | How can the two great theories be combined? |
| A “theory of everything” | Could one theory explain all of physics? |
Hawking’s editor warned him that every equation in the book would halve its sales, so he included only one: Einstein’s E = mc².
A bestseller few finished?
The book spent a record 237 weeks on the UK Sunday Times bestseller list. It was so famous for being bought but not finished that a mathematician jokingly invented the “Hawking Index,” measuring how far readers got through popular books. Hawking later wrote a simpler version, A Briefer History of Time (2005).
Stephen Hawking
Hawking was diagnosed with motor neuron disease (ALS) at 21 and given only a few years to live. He lived for more than 50 more years, eventually communicating through a speech-generating computer whose robotic voice became famous.
| Achievement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Hawking radiation (1974) | Showed that black holes should slowly give off energy and could eventually evaporate |
| Lucasian Professor of Mathematics | At Cambridge, a post once held by Isaac Newton |
| Died | March 14, 2018, which is also Einstein’s birthday |
He’s buried in Westminster Abbey, near Newton and Darwin. His life was dramatized in the film The Theory of Everything (2014), which won Eddie Redmayne the Oscar for Best Actor.
For the science behind black holes, see what an event horizon is and what general relativity is.
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