The Quest for More Knowledge

An age-old tradition in the scientific community is to celebrate the career of an eminent scientist upon reaching his or her 60th birthday. This particular volume was written to celebrate Steven Hawking’s 60th birthday, which not only because of his prolific scientific work, but also his physical condition is all the more reason to celebrate his life and achievements, during which, physics has grown to encompass the entire spectrum of matter – bridging particle physics with cosmology.

The book is divided into 9 sections, with topics ranging from Desitter Space, M-Space, Hawking Radiation, Black Holes, Spacetime, Singularities, Quantum Gravity, Cosmology, as well as an overview of Hawking’s career. As one would expect, the sections are high-quality writings, providing not only a celebration of Hawking’s lifework, but also a time capsule for future researchers of the history of the state of the art in physics at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Contributors include Hawkings’ one-time research partner Roger Penrose, as well as other luminaries of the physics research community, including Martin Rees, Kip Thorne, Werner Israel, Leonard Susskind, James Hartle, Alan Guth, and others. In addition to the discussions of physics theory, there are more personal references made by the likes of Stanford’s Leonard Susskind in which he recounts debating with Hawking on information loss in black holes; with the University of Oxford’s Roger

Penrose on the theory of black hole entropy; and with Caltech’s Kip Thorne on cosmic censorship (the existance of naked singularities) and the possibility of time travel.

Incidentally, Hawking and Susskind have been named Distinguished Research Chairs of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, at which the likes of Lee Smolin and Gerard t’Hooft are also members.
Rating: 5 / 5

This book collects a series of lectures given at a conference celebrating Stephan Hawking’s sixtieth birthday. If you don’t know who Stephen Hawking is then this book is definitely not for you! His contributions are too extensive to give a comprehensive list here, a very short list of highlights would include seminal contributions to singularity theorems, quantum cosmology, co-authoring one of the great books in general relativity and his discovery that black holes emit (approximately?) thermal radiation. The lectures collected in this book provide a more complete overview of the many areas in which he has contributed. Given Hawking’s accomplishments it’s not surprising that the books contributors include many of the world’s most prominent physicists.

There are forty-four chapters covering a vast range of topics in theoretical physics. The level of the material also has a wide range, from introductory to very advanced discussions. I thought the selection of papers was great.

The first part of the book is at a very introductory level. That isn’t to say the material isn’t quite interesting. The topics include basic general relativity, gravity waves, cosmology and singularities. This part should be accessible to a general audience.

The remainder of the book is more advanced, some of it quite advanced. Nevertheless I would expect much of it to be accessible to advanced undergraduates. Some of the material is fairly standard such as cosmology (standard general relativity treatment), inflation and black holes (standard general relativity version). However, most of the topics presented involve less well understood physics.

It’s difficult to describe the breadth of the content without just looking a table of contents, but I’ll try to give a rough idea of it. Not surprisingly there are many talks on physics of black holes that isn’t completely understood. A partial list of black hole topics includes: primordial black holes, inner-horizon stability (a tentative answer is given), string effects and information loss. Here is a very coarse grained list of the rest of the content: loop quantum gravity, chronology protection conjecture, topology change, the holographic principle (or conjecture, depending on who you ask), Euclidean quantum gravity, topology change, string theory (touched on in many talks), quantum cosmology (basic, with supersymmetry and implication for the problem of time), cosmology (a wide variety) and more.

In summary, many interesting ideas in theoretical physics are discussed. They naturally center on general relativity, quantum gravity and cosmology. Even the difficult topics are fairly accessible. I would expect most graduate students would enjoy it, as would many advanced undergraduates with a solid background in general relativity and quantum mechanics (however, a lot of the material is quite challenging). Some of the material would also be interesting to astronomy and astrophysics students too.
Rating: 4 / 5