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“... Stephen Hawking is now 50 years old, and has lived 25 years longer than he once expected to live. As a scientist he long ago earned the respect of his colleagues; more recently, with the astonishing success of his book A Brief History of Time, he has become a widely recognised public figure. Immobile for decades, he is now unable to communicate except by means of an electronic voice-synthesiser connected to a word-processor ...”

“... The Nature of Space and Time contains six lectures-three by Stephen Hawking, three by Roger Penrose – and a closing Hawking-Penrose debate. As Penrose indicates, it might be viewed as continuing the famous Bohr-Einstein exchange of some seventy years ago. Against the background of new cosmological theories, Hawking defends Bohr’s thesis that quantum theory has no radical incompleteness ...”

“... of work. After the enormous press coverage of A Brief History of Time, all the world knows that Stephen Hawking has motor neurone disease, can speak only with a computer-synthesised voice controlled by the few fingers that he can move, and fills the same Cambridge chair as Newton did. The 14 essays of the new book, together with a Christmas Day radio ...”

“... rarely calls to talk about my research. In April, however, she rang to ask: ‘Do you agree with Stephen Hawking?’ That’s usually an easy question to field. On topics ranging from the behaviour of black holes to the structure of the early universe, a safe answer is yes. But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to know. She wanted to know whether I ...”

“... root & flourish in [his] own time’. More than that, he was liked. Among scientists perhaps only Stephen Hawking has given his admirers such a strong feeling that they knew him personally. Strangers wrote with random queries, such as why do pigeons fly in circles, and anecdotes of animal behaviour: R.M. Middleton of West Hartlepool explained how he had ...”

“... don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what reality is,’ Stephen Hawking says), but Penrose believes that such matters are crucial to quantum mechanics and are far from being settled. He explains why standard approaches fail to solve the problem, and proposes instead that quantum measurement processes are ...”

“... he cannot easily write them. They are certain he would be able to communicate via a computer, as Stephen Hawking does, and refuse to accept that there is an invisible difference between John and Hawking, which is that Hawking, physically disabled though he is by neurological ...”

“... was immediately catapulted to international (and unwelcome) fame. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking claims that later examination of the eclipse results has revealed that the agreement between experiment and theory had been entirely fortuitous, since the margin of experimental error was actually as large as Einstein’s predicted angle of ...”

“... These might nowadays be ending their ‘black hole evaporation’ (a process discovered by Stephen Hawking) in bangs detectable from two million light years away. Bigger black holes, their evaporation too slow to be detected, probably litter our galaxy in large numbers as the remnants of stellar explosions. Other such remnants are neutron ...”

“... scientists are numbered many of the best-known figures (and popularisers) of our day, such as Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg and Roger Penrose, not to mention all the proponents of superstring theory. But Horgan has also found some more fitting targets for his scorn. The expansion of science, the increasingly brutish struggle for survival that ...”

“... existence in this cosy, uninvaded corner of the universe. In fact, they had discovered pulsars. Stephen Hawking agrees: ‘If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.’ When the truth seems to be out there, our best bet for surviving would appear to be not to ...”

“... activity, and hence to make it more humane. The villains of the book are Bertrand Russell and Stephen Hawking. Russell is presented as an ‘iniquitous’ apologist for science (why does that man still bring the word ‘iniquity’ to so many lips? He can’t be all bad, if he continues to prompt that description). ...”

“... holes. But even black holes, it turns out, are not foolproof containers. Penrose’s colleague Stephen Hawking demonstrated 35 years ago that black holes should radiate, slowly but surely emitting energy in the form of low-energy light. (This ‘Hawking radiation’ is compatible with Penrose’s earlier proofs ...”

“... has not, attributing the latter to some psychological defect in the great man’s make-up. Thus Stephen Hawking added to his Brief History of Time a short appendix on what he calls Newton’s ‘deviousness and vitriol’. Hawking claims, oddly, that Kepler discovered his planetary laws by observation alone, that ...”

“... consists of two unequal chronological sequences: the philosophers in the titles go from Thales to Stephen Hawking, while the poems below cover the ground from 1795 to 1834, Pantisocracy, Madoc and the Welsh Indians, early pioneers, Lewis and Clark, stray Irishmen, the Satanic School of Byron and Moore. The two disciplines are pretty arbitrarily related ...”