Book · 1988
A Brief History of Time
by Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking explains black holes, the Big Bang, and the edge of time to people who never took a physics class.
What does Reddit think of A Brief History of Time?
All 11 mentions across the 7-year window live in r/askscience, and the pattern is telling: the book shows up more as a reference point than as a recommendation. Commenters cite it when they want to flag the limits of popular science. The highest-upvoted thread (↑1388) is a genuine endorsement — someone telling an OP to pick it up for a deeper look at cosmology. The next-most-upvoted (↑98) is a mathematician telling readers to find something more rigorous. By ↑54, a commenter is quoting Ethan Siegel's argument that the book's particle-pair explanation of Hawking radiation is "egregiously incorrect" and has "misinformed physics enthusiasts for 32 years." The sentiment across all 11 unique commenters is flat — not hostile, not glowing. r/askscience treats it as the entry-level floor: fine for getting oriented, actively misleading if you stop there. That is a coherent, specific verdict. Mention frequency is low and spread unevenly across years, peaking in 2019 and 2023 with three mentions each.
Community feedback & reader fit
Themes
- · Cosmology and the origin of the universe
- · Black holes and Hawking radiation
- · Special and general relativity
- · The limits of popular science explanations
- · Time, space, and the shape of the universe
Common praise
- + The book gets non-physicists oriented in cosmology faster than most alternatives at its level.
- + Hawking earns repeated citations in r/askscience for making special relativity legible to a general audience.
- + Readers who finish it know enough to ask better questions — the ↑36 commenter points to it as a reason to go read more Hawking.
Common criticism
- − The particle-pair explanation of Hawking radiation is called out by name in r/askscience as factually wrong, citing Ethan Siegel's critique (↑54).
- − Mathematically trained readers in r/askscience actively warn against treating it as a rigorous source (↑98).
- − Multiple answers in r/askscience threads are flagged as outdated Hawking-era positions that Hawking himself later rejected (↑23).
- − A ↑25 comment bluntly tells someone citing the book to stop commenting on technical topics if this is their main source.
Who it's for
You have no physics background and want to understand what people mean when they say "black hole" or "the Big Bang" — start here. If you already took a semester of calculus-based physics, r/askscience is going to send you somewhere more rigorous. The book functions as a map of the questions, not an answer to them. Treat it that way and it holds up; treat it as your final word on Hawking radiation and at least one ↑54 commenter will correct you publicly.
Mentions over time
Top subreddits
Which Reddit comments matter for A Brief History of Time?
Top-upvoted quotes across the subreddits where this book is mentioned. Click through to read the full thread.
“OP, I recommend reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking if you want a much more in-depth look at this theory. I’m in the middle of the book right now and it’s fascinating.
“If you're a mathematician, I'd recommend reading more rigorous sources than A Brief History of Time. Electron orbitals are the stationary solutions of the time-independent Schrodinger equation. The electron having negative total energy (where "zero" energy is defined by a particle at r = infinity,…
“From Starts With a Bang: "And yet, in his landmark 1988 book, A Brief History Of Time, Hawking paints a picture of this radiation — of spontaneously created particle-antiparticle pairs where one member falls in and the other escapes — that's egregiously incorrect. For 32 years, it's misinformed ph…
“The second. The speed of light is constant in all reference frames. So the signal travels at c, regardless of the velocity of its source, and no relay needs to exist. And yeah, special relativity is really hard to picture. Read some of Hawking's books, he was really good at explaining that stuff…
“> Again, my understanding is fairly limited and largely from popular press like a brief history of time and such. So any errors here are all me. In that case please refrain from commenting, especially on very technical topic such as this one. A good rule of thumb is that if you can't provide peer r…
“A lot of these are answers that haven't been updated since Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Hawking ended up rejecting some of his own theories from the time. I strongly recommend Battle of the [Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins](
“Somebody would have to help me out with the specifics, but in A Brief History of Time, Hawking describes the matter manifestation of the entire universe being balanced on a knife edge of particle symmetry... I could be wrong but I believe he says it’s possible for all matter in the universe to som…
“In A Brief History Of Time, near the end of the book, Hawking discusses a universe which is borderless and expands around you as you move through it, creating infinite movement through space. I don't think i fully understood how this was possible, does it require that space folds in a way like the …
Convinced? Pick up A Brief History of Time
What else does r/askscience read?
Other books mentioned in the same sub, ranked. Shared-sub overlap with this title breaks ties.
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution makes more sense when you stop rooting for the organism and start watching the gene.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee traces cancer from ancient papyrus to targeted therapy, framing it as a 4,000-year war medicine is still losing on some fronts.
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe takes absurd physics questions — what if a baseball traveled at 90% the speed of light? — and answers them with actual math.
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Neil Shubin
A paleontologist finds a fish fossil in the Arctic and uses it to trace the evolutionary origin of your hands, ears, and hernias.
Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive
Philipp Dettmer
Philipp Dettmer of Kurzgesagt turns the immune system into a 300-page illustrated war story, written for the person who watched every YouTube video and still wanted more.
Cosmos
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan's 1980 tour of 15 billion years of cosmic history, written for anyone who once looked up and wanted a real answer.
A Brief History of Time — frequently asked
What does Reddit think of A Brief History of Time?+
Broadly neutral and specific about the limits. All 11 mentions in the dataset come from r/askscience, where the book functions as a citation rather than a ringing endorsement. The top comment (↑1388) recommends it sincerely; the second-highest (↑98) warns mathematicians away. The consensus that emerges from the thread data is: useful floor, not a ceiling.
Is A Brief History of Time's explanation of Hawking radiation accurate?+
No, according to r/askscience. A ↑54 comment quotes physicist Ethan Siegel calling the book's particle-antiparticle-pair picture of Hawking radiation "egregiously incorrect" and argues it has misled physics enthusiasts for over three decades. Hawking's own later work walked back some of the positions from the original 1988 text.
Should I read A Brief History of Time if I want to understand cosmology seriously?+
Depends on where you're starting. For a complete non-specialist, yes — the ↑1388 commenter in r/askscience points to it as a genuinely useful introduction to the theory. If you have any quantitative background, r/askscience commenters consistently push toward more rigorous sources, noting the book's explanations are pop-science approximations, not physics.
Is A Brief History of Time still relevant in 2026?+
As cultural shorthand, yes. As science, partially. An r/askscience commenter (↑23) notes that several answers from Hawking-era threads haven't been updated to reflect theories Hawking himself revised. The book maps a moment in cosmology — 1988 — and some of that map is now outdated. The 11 mentions across 7 years suggest it remains a reference, not an active recommendation.