Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time

Since I have recently been pursuing the fundamental philosophical question "why is there something instead of nothing" from one end of the philosophical tradition, Daoist metaphysics in particular, I decided to switch gears for a bit and see what professor Hawking had to say about the issue.

A Brief History of Time is an eminently accessible guided tour, not through time itself, but through the Western tradition's understanding of the nature of the universe.  Hawking walks the reader through the major paradigm shifts in intellectual history, beginning with the Copernican revolution, and explains in each case why the previous theory had to be abandoned and why the new one was chosen.  The first section of the book should be familiar to most readers from high school.  The second half was all things I had heard of before, and understood to some extent, but quantum mechanics et al. are always worth thinking about again.

Hawking presents the history of cosmology as the gradual reconciliation and elaboration of partial theories, with the current problem in physics understood as the production of a theory that will unify quantum mechanics and general relativity; in other words, reconcile our theories about what happens at very small scales and very large ones, respectively.  Reading this book makes me nostalgic for the alternate life in which I pursued mathematics and understood in something more than a qualitative way what was at stake in all of this, but Hawking generously includes the rest of us in the conversation with his clear presentation.

The best part of the book, by far, is Hawking's stories about the bets he has made with various physicists on points of theoretical contention.

"I... believe there are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature."