'Brief Answers to Big Questions' - Stephen Hawking's final book

The Summer reading list for 2019 included the final book of renowned physicist, Professor Stephen Hawking who had died in March 2018.  The book is essentially a collection of answers to various critical questions drawn from Hawking's archive and accumulated over many years. In addressing the varied issues, Hawking and his assistants have sought to compile answers to complex yet widely asked issues such as: is there intelligent life in the universe ? Can we predict the future ? Is time travel possible ? Will artificial intelligence outsmart us ?

Most telling, Hawking also confronts the most immediate concern of climate change  and the environment directly by asking - can we survive on Earth and should we colonise space ?

With his characteristic humour, the book is full of quirky quotes - for the question as to whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, he concludes "..it must be a very long way away otherwise it would have visited Earth by now. And I think we would've known if we had been visited: it would be like the film Independence Day".

In confronting the biggest threat to planet Earth, Hawking concludes that while an asteroid collision is possible, the last big event was sixty-five million years ago. The immediate threat is runaway climate change. As he concludes, "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, but with a temperature of 250 degrees Celsius".

This book is made for a non-science reader with the extra treat being that it includes Hawking's work on black holes and the relationship between Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and the later theory of Quantum Mechanics  - explained in clear, simple language. This is a must read book confronting some of the major science and ethical questions of the era.