Physics World turns 30 next month, but it’s not the only big anniversary in physics this year. That’s because 1988 also saw the publication of Stephen Hawking’s best-selling popular-science book A Brief History of Time.
Hawking, who died on 14 March, went on to write several other books, but it turns out he was working on a final title at the time of his death. Entitled Brief Answers to the Big Questions, the book is set to be published by John Murray on 16 October.
Full details of the book are still under wraps, but according to the publishers, it is “drawn from his extraordinary personal archive and has been completed in collaboration with his academic colleagues, his family and the Stephen Hawking Estate”. The book will comprise Hawking’s “most profound, accessible, and timely reflections” on 10 questions, such as the existence of God, whether we can predict the future and whether artificial intelligence will outsmart us.
To mark its publication, John Murray has also commissioned Josh Kirklin, a PhD student at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, where Hawking was based, to set a series of fiendish puzzles inspired by the book.
The puzzles will be released every week starting later today (20 September) on the website briefanswerstothebigquestions.com, but the publishers have given Physics World readers a sneak preview to the first puzzle (see below). The answer to each puzzle is a nine-letter word. The first nine answers, put into a nine-by-nine grid, form the basis for the tenth question.
There’s a prize from John Murray for the first correct entry in the form of an “exclusive Hawking print” provided by the Stephen Hawking Estate. To enter the quiz and for more details, go to briefanswerstothebigquestions.com.
I’m sure Physics World readers will enjoy the challenges, given that you responded in such large numbers to our own set of five puzzles that we created to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Physics World five years ago in conjunction with GCHQ.
Finally, if you want to find out more about Hawking’s life and work, check out our free-to-read collection “Remembering Stephen Hawking”.
