kuniga.me > Books > Brief Answers to the Big Questions

Brief Answers to the Big Questions

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking. Hawking provides his take on several questions for which we don’t have an answer today such as “Is there intelligent other life in the universe?” or “Is Time Travel Possible?”. In his answers Hawking also provides a glimpse of his personal life.

Some interesting bits I noted from the book:

• The lifespan of the Sun is about 9 billion years and 3.5 billion has ellapsed, so we have about 5.5 billions left in the solar system.
• He estimates that DNA has 100,000,000 bits (12.5MB) of useful information
• Argument for why intelligent life is pretty rare: it took 2 billion years to go from uni to multi cellular which is a good portion of the Sun's lifetime so it would seem we got pretty lucky with timing.
• Suggests the unified theory of everything will rely on mathematical beauty instead of experiments.
• Quote: Behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher

Interesting but like other pop-sci books it’s not technical enough to my satisfaction. Was nice to learn some bits about Hawking’s life. Rating: 4/5

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This entry was parsed from an older retrospective post.