Does the universe have a beginning? Does it run on knowable laws, and may it yet yield a single, coherent description?

Stephen Hawking invites you to join that investigation—from ancient skywatchers to relativity and quantum theory—without drowning in equations. He sketches their uneasy truce, then ventures into singularities and black holes, including his radical claim that they glow and slowly evaporate.

Along the universe's passage come the Big Bang and inflation, the expansion of space, entropy’s arrow of time, and the delicate role of observation and probability. Hawking uses clean metaphors and thought experiments to turn abstract maths into graspable pictures.

A Brief History of Time reframes what “time” means, shows how science builds truth from models, and gives you a lucid toolkit for thinking about reality—from free will to the fate of the cosmos.