Publication: Edit Simon Mitton Astronomy Cambridge University Press

Publication[edit]
Early in 1983, Hawking first approached Simon Mitton, the editor in

charge of astronomy books at Cambridge University Press, with his
ideas for a popular book on cosmology. Mitton was doubtful about all
the equations in the draft manuscript, which he felt would put off the
buyers in airport bookshops that Hawking wished to reach. With some
difficulty, he persuaded Hawking to drop all but one equation.[4] The
author himself notes in the book's acknowledgements that he was
warned that for every equation in the book, the readership would be
halved, hence it includes only a single equation: E = mc2. The book
does employ a number of complex models, diagrams, and other
illustrations to detail some of the concepts it explores.
Contents[edit]
In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking attempts to explain a
range of subjects in cosmology, including the Big Bang, black
holes and light cones, to the nonspecialist reader. His main goal is to
give an overview of the subject, but he also attempts to explain some
complex mathematics. In the 1996 edition of the book and subsequent
editions, Hawking discusses the possibility of time travel and
wormholes and explores the possibility of having a universe without a
quantum singularity at the beginning of time.
Chapter 1: Our Picture of the Universe[edit]
A picture of Ptolemy's earth-centric model about the location of the

planets, stars, and sun.
In the first chapter, Hawking discusses the history of astronomical
studies, including the ideas of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Aristotle, unlike
many other people of his time, thought that the Earth was round. He
came to this conclusion by observing lunar eclipses, which he thought
were caused by the earth's round shadow, and also by observing an
increase in altitude of the North Star from the perspective of observers
situated further to the north. Aristotle also thought that
the sun and stars went around the Earth in perfect circles, because of
"mystical reasons". Second-century Greek astronomer Ptolemy also
pondered the positions of the sun and stars in the universe and made a
planetary model that described Aristotle's thinking in more detail.
Today, it is known that the opposite is true: the earth goes around the
sun. The Aristotelian and Ptolemaic ideas about the position of the
stars and sun were disproved in 1609. The first person to present a
detailed arguments that the earth revolves around the sun was the
Polish priest Nicholas Copernicus, in 1514. Nearly a century
later, Galileo Galilei, an Italian scientist, and Johannes Kepler, a
German scientist, studied how the moons of some planets moved in
the sky, and used their observations to validate Copernicus's thinking.
To fit the observations, Kepler proposed an elliptical orbit model
instead of a circular one. In his 1687 book on gravity, Principia
Mathematica, Isaac Newton used complex mathematics to further
support Copernicus's idea. Newton's model also meant that stars, like
the sun, were not fixed but, rather, faraway moving objects.
Nevertheless, Newton believed that the universe was made up of an
infinite number of stars which were more or less static. Many of his
contemporaries, including German philosopher Heinrich Olbers,
disagreed.
The origin of the universe represented another great topic of study and
debate over the centuries. Early philosophers like Aristotle thought
that the universe has existed forever, while theologians such as St.
Augustine believed it was created at a specific time. St. Augustine
also believed that time was a concept that was born with the creation
of the universe. More than 1000 years later, German
philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that time goes back forever.
In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are
moving away from each other. Consequently, there was a time,
between ten and twenty billion years ago, when they were all together
in one singular extremely dense place. This discovery brought the
concept of the beginning of the universe within the province of
science. Today, scientists use two partial theories, Einstein's general
theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, to describe the workings
of the universe. Scientists are still looking for a complete unified
theory that would describe everything in the universe. Hawking
believes that the discovery of a complete unified theory may not aid
the survival of our species, and may not even affect our life-style, but
that humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough
for our continuing quest,and that our goal is nothing less than a
complete description of the universe we live in. [5]

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Publication[edit]

Early in 1983, Hawking first approached Simon Mitton, the editor in

A picture of Ptolemy's earth-centric model about the location of the

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