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A Brief History of Time (subtitled "From the Big Bang to Black Holes") is a popular science book written by British physicist Stephen Hawking and first published by the Bantam Dell Publishing Group in 1988.
It became a best seller and has sold more than 10 million copies.
It was also on the London Sunday Times best-seller list for more than five years.
A Brief History of Time attempts to explain a range of subjects in cosmology, including the Big Bang, black holes and light cones,
to the nonspecialist reader. Its main goal is to give an overview of
the subject but, unusual for a popular science book, it also attempts to
explain some complex mathematics.
The 1996 edition of the book and subsequent editions discuss the
possibility of time travel and wormholes and explore the possibility of
having a universe without a quantum singularity at the beginning of
time.
The author notes that an editor warned him that for every equation in the book the readership would be halved, hence it includes only a single equation:
E = mc2. Early in 1983, Hawking approached Simon Mitton, the editor in charge of astronomy books at Cambridge University Press,
with his ideas for a popular book on cosmology. Mitton was doubtful
about all the equations in the draft manuscript, which he felt would put
off the buyers in airport bookshops that Hawking wished to reach. It
was with some difficulty that he persuaded Hawking to drop all but one
equation.
In addition to Hawking's notable abstention from presenting equations,
the book also simplifies matters by means of illustrations throughout
the text, depicting complex models and diagrams.
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