John Murray Publishers Ltd Brief Answers To The Big Questions: The Final Book From Stephen Hawking

Good book

This was my first ever order from amazon and was also my first ever book I ordered online and this book is great for people interested in science, even if someone isnt good in science they still can read and understand this book as it is combined in such a great and understandable manner, I would recommend it and is worth the price.

Stephen Hawking was a professor at Cambridge University, and arguably the most famous scientist since Einstein. In Brief Answers to the Big Questions he writes: Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful… What came before the Big Bang? According to the no-boundary proposal, asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless – like asking what is south of the South Pole – because there is no notion of time available to refer to. The concept of time only exists within our universe… Why haven’t we been visited by alien forms of life? Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy – or in the observable universe – on which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self-reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence. We are used to thinking of intelligent life as an inevitable consequence of evolution, but what if it isn’t? It is not even clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value. Bacteria, and other single-cell organisms, may live on if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions… Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus – and I don’t think they thought they were better off for it… What is the biggest threat to the future of this planet? An asteroid collision would be, a threat against which we have no defence. But the last big such asteroid collision was about sixty-six million years ago and killed the dinosaurs. A more immediate danger is runaway climate change. A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade (482 degrees Fahrenheit)… When an artificial intelligence (AI) becomes better than humans at AI design, so that it can recursively improve itself without human help, we may face an intelligence explosion that ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails. When that happens, we will need to ensure that the computers have goals aligned with ours… In his book Life 3.0, MIT professor Max Tegmark warns that this alignment is not an easy task: “Suppose a bunch of ants create you to be a recursively self-improving robot, much smarter than them, who shares their goals and helps build bigger and better anthills, and that you eventually attain the human-level intelligence and understanding that you have now. Do you think you’ll spend the rest of your days just optimizing anthills, or do you think you might develop a taste for more sophisticated questions and pursuits that the ants have no ability to comprehend? If so, do you think you’ll find a way to override the ant-protection urge that your formicine creators endowed you with, in much the same way that the real you overrides some of the urges your genes have given you? And in that case, might a superintelligent friendly AI find our current human goals as uninspiring and vapid as you find those of the ants, and evolve new goals different from those it learned and adopted from us? Perhaps there’s a way of designing a self-improving AI that’s guaranteed to retain human-friendly goals forever, but I think it’s fair to say that we don’t yet know how to build one – or even whether it’s possible.” Hawking extends the analogy: A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydro-electric green-energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants… On whether or not God exists, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) have said it all. And for more extended discussions on the best solutions to climate change, Stanford professor Mark Jacobson is to be recommended. For his part, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom has discussed the dangers of AI in detail in his book Superintelligence. But if what you want is Brief Answers to the Big Questions, this is the book!

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The light hearted writing of Stephen Hawking makes the book enjoyable. I warmly recommend it.

In my opinion the book is very good: well written and able to pass the message that Nature is incredibly fascinating. I keep re-reading its parts and each time I discover something that I did not have realized before. Of course, the fact that no mathematics is present may be a limit for those readers with deeper background, however there are already many textbooks on Cosmology and Quantum mechanics that can satisfy their curiosity. From my side, I have just started with the R. Penrose's " Road to Reality". I recommend the book without any hesitation.

Good quality. Not a lot to be said.