Book Review: ‘Brief Answers to the Big Questions’

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Updated 12 June 2025
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Book Review: ‘Brief Answers to the Big Questions’

  • Final work by the renowned physicist combines complex scientific ideas with accessible explanations, making it a must-read for anyone curious about the cosmos

Stephen Hawking’s “Brief Answers to the Big Questions” is a fascinating and thought-provoking exploration of science’s most profound mysteries, offering insights into the origins of the universe and humanity’s place within it. 

Published in 2018, this final work by the renowned physicist combines complex scientific ideas with accessible explanations, making it a must-read for anyone curious about the cosmos. 

Hawking begins by addressing how the universe came into existence. He explains that the laws of physics are sufficient to describe the universe’s origins, suggesting that it could arise from a state of nothingness due to the balance of positive and negative energy. 

By linking this to the nature of time, which began alongside the universe itself, he offers a perspective grounded in scientific reasoning. 

The book also delves into the evolution of the universe and the evidence supporting it. Hawking discusses how the redshift of light from distant galaxies confirms the universe’s expansion, while the cosmic microwave background radiation provides a glimpse into its dense, hot beginnings. 

Through the anthropic principle, he demonstrates how the unique conditions of our universe make life possible, underscoring how rare such conditions are. 

Hawking also considers the possibility of extraterrestrial life, suggesting that while life may exist elsewhere, intelligent civilizations are unlikely to be nearby or at the same stage of development. He cautions against attempts to communicate with alien life, warning that such interactions could pose risks to humanity. 

One of the book’s most intriguing sections explores black holes. Hawking examines their immense density, the singularity at their core, and the paradox of information loss. He explains how black holes might release information as they evaporate, preserving the fundamental laws of physics. 

Beyond its scientific insights, the book is a call to action. Hawking urges readers to prioritize scientific progress, safeguard the planet, and prepare for the challenges of the future. 

Though some sections may challenge non-experts, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions” remains accessible, inspiring, and deeply insightful — a fitting conclusion to Hawking’s extraordinary legacy. 
 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Have Willpower’

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Updated 18 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Have Willpower’

  • In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying “yes” against our better judgment

Authors: Prudentius and Plutarch 
Edited and translated by Michael Fontaine

“How to Have Willpower” brings together two profound ancient meditations on how to overcome pressures that encourage us to act against our own best interests—Plutarch’s essay On Dysopia or How to Resist Pressure and Prudentius’s poetic allegory Psychomachia or How to Slay Your Demons. 
Challenging the idea that humans are helpless victims of vice, these works—introduced and presented in vivid, accessible new prose translations by Michael Fontaine, with the original Latin and Greek texts on facing pages—emphasize the power of personal choice and the possibility of personal growth, as they offer insights and practical advice about resisting temptation.

In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying “yes” against our better judgment. And in a delightfully different work, Prudentius, a Latin Christian poet, dramatizes the necessity to actively fight temptation through the story of an epic battle within the human soul between fierce warrior women representing our virtues and vices.

 

 


Book Review: ‘When Breath Becomes Air’

Updated 17 July 2025
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Book Review: ‘When Breath Becomes Air’

  • Kalanithi, an American neurosurgeon, talks about his own journey from being a physician to becoming a patient himself facing premature mortality

Published a year after the author’s death aged 37 in 2015, “When Breath Becomes Air” is an autobiography about the life and struggle with terminal lung cancer of Dr. Paul Kalanithi.

In the book, Kalanithi, an American neurosurgeon at Stanford University, talks about his own journey from being a physician providing treatment to his patients to becoming a patient himself facing premature mortality.

The narrative moves from talking about how Kalanithi saved lives to confronting the end of his own, reflecting on what makes life worth living in the face of death.

Despite his diagnosis, Kalanithi continued working as a physician and even became a father, explaining to his readers how he embraced life fully until the very end.

Unfortunately, the book had to be completed by his wife after his passing, and serves as a moving meditation on legacy, purpose, and the human experience.

Among the book’s strengths are its authenticity and depth of emotions, touching on everything from the day-to-day experiences of physicians to Kalanithi’s own love of literature — originally, he had studied English at university. A fitting tribute, then, that his own work would go on to become a New York Times’ bestseller.

Neurosurgery, though, was in his words an “unforgiving call to perfection” which not even his diagnosis could check. “Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when,” he wrote. “After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when.”

The book garnered praise upon publication, winning the Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir and Autobiography in 2016. Its run on the NYT’s bestseller list lasted an impressive 68 weeks.

Writing in the Guardian, Alice O’Keefe suggested: “The power of this book lies in its eloquent insistence that we are all confronting our mortality every day, whether we know it or not. The real question we face, Kalanithi writes, is not how long, but rather how, we will live — and the answer does not appear in any medical textbook.”
 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology’

Updated 17 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology’

Author: Steven A. Balbus

General relativity has entered a new phase of its development as technical advances have led to the direct detection of gravitational radiation from the merging of single pairs of stellar-sized black holes. The exquisite sensitivity of pulsar signal timing measurements has also been exploited to reveal the presence of a background of gravitational waves, most likely arising from the mergers of supermassive black holes thought to be present at the center of most galaxies. This book demonstrates how general relativity is central to understanding these and other observations. 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Change a Memory’ by Steve Ramirez

Updated 16 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Change a Memory’ by Steve Ramirez

As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones.

In “How to Change a Memory,” Ramirez draws on his own memories—of friendship, family, loss, and recovery—to reveal how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited, and even constructed from nothing.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘In The Brain, In Theory’

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Updated 16 July 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘In The Brain, In Theory’

  • Engineering is the use of knowledge to solve technical problems, to build an artifact with a plan

Author: ROMAIN BRETTE 

“In The Brain, In Theory,” Romain Brette argues that the brain is not a “biological computer” because living organisms are not engineered.

Engineering is the use of knowledge to solve technical problems, to build an artifact with a plan. Brette reviews the main theoretical frameworks for thinking about the brain, including computation, neural representations, information, and prediction, and finds them poorly suited to the study of biological cognition.

He proposes understanding the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities rather than an optimized assembly of machine components.