kanadalainen
A pint of dark matter, please.
Funny you would put it that way. The Free Press article referred to the book as having "a reputation for being owned more than read".
This is a very famous (and long-standing) assessment, not limited to the pages of the Free Press. Its why he released another version of the book many years after the first release (A briefer history of time). If you have read the original book, you will understand why he felt the need to chop down the content even more. It was marketed as a new iteration to incorporate string theory, and touch on inequities of the behaviour of massive objects in our viewable universe eg, the theoretical existence of dark matter to explain the nature of movement of clusters of galaxies, etc, but in reality it was a chance to render the original in a slightly more digestible form for the layperson. I think books by Brian Greene on string theory may have spurred the publication of the second book (Superstring Theory, The Elegant Universe).
A Briefer History of Time (Hawking and Mlodinow book) - Wikipedia
In the original, reading past anything beyond Chapter two invokes an exponential increase in content depth, and requires concentration and something more akin to studying for an exam, with sidenotes, interpretation and rereading (at least for me). My copy looks like one of my notebooks.
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