Brief Answers to the Big Questions

Brief Answers to the Big Questions — summary

A man who outlived his death sentence by fifty-four years

In the spring of 1963, a twenty-one-year-old graduate student in Cambridge was told he had two years to live. His muscles had begun to betray him on the ice rink. The doctors at St Bartholomew's never said the words out loud, but Stephen Hawking pieced it together himself: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The body was already shutting down. The mind, presumably, would have nothing left to do but watch.

He died on 14 March 2018, at the age of seventy-six. In the fifty-four bonus years between those two dates, he discovered that black holes glow, married twice, fathered three children, wrote one of the bestselling science books in history, opened the Paralympic Games in London, and quietly assembled the manuscript that would become this one. *Brief Answers to the Big Questions* was finished after his death by his family, students, and colleagues, working from an archive of speeches, essays, and interviews he had been refining for years. It is the closest thing we will ever get to his last word on the questions he chased his entire adult life.

The book is organised around ten of those questions, and they are not modest. Is there a God. How did the universe begin. Are we alone. Can we predict the future. What is inside a black hole. Is time travel possible. Will we survive on Earth. Should we colonise space. Will artificial intelligence outsmart us. How do we shape the future. What follows below is a tour through Hawking's answers, in plain English, with the stories and analogies he used to make these ideas land for people who never took a physics class.