Brief Answers to the Big Questions

Published in 2018, Brief Answers to the Big Questions is a popular science book that explains what scientists have learned about the birth and history of the universe and the future of human technological civilization. As the final published writing by physicist Stephen Hawking, the work became a bestseller and landed on several best-book lists. Hawking, author of the best-selling work A Brief History of Time, was a chief contributor to many of the discoveries that the book discusses. Widely considered the greatest scientist since Albert Einstein, Hawking made major contributions to theory about the black holes that lie at the center of most galaxies and to human understanding of the beginnings of space and time. Each chapter of Brief Answers begins with a question that the author’s audiences often asked; the rest of the chapter provides an answer, drawing from the extensive archive of Hawking’s lectures, speeches, and essays. Hawking’s colleagues finished and published the work in the months following his death.

Other work by this author includes the book, The Universe in a Nutshell.

The e-book version of the original edition forms the basis for this study guide.

Summary

In the Foreword and Introduction, Eddie Redmayne—who portrayed Hawking in the film The Theory of Everything—and Kip Thorne, a Caltech professor of astrophysics who worked with Hawking on the theory of gravitational waves, offer their appreciations of the author.