by Stephen Hawking. The idea of the multiverse that the observable universe in which we live doesn't exist independently, apart from anything else, but is one member of an enormous collection of physically real universes has been propagated to nonscientists by such physicist-authors as Michio Kaku (Parallel Worlds, 2004) and Leonard Susskind (The Cosmic Landscape, 2006). However laudable their popular-science efforts, Stephen Hawking's pitch of the multiverse concept likely will reach more readers not solely due to his world-wide fame but also because of the efficiently precise, understandable, and lightly jesting prose of Hawking and coauthor Mlodinow (also a physicist and author). Posing simple, fundamental questions such as, Why do we exist? the authors employ word pictures, analogies to everyday experience, but (blessedly) no equations to convey the physics that are involved in the answer this book ultimately offers. Sympathetically noting that quantum mechanics and general relativity remain as counterintuitive to experts as to laypeople, Hawking and Mlodinow alight on the probabilistic nature of energy and matter, frames of reference, string theory, and the incredibly finely-tuned values of physical forces and masses that permit life to exist, combining their presentations into the propositions of M-theory about what initiated the big bang. Repetition of the multi-mega-copy sales of A Brief History of Time (1988) can be safely predicted; expect queues in stores and libraries for Hawking's latest parting of the veil to far-out physics. --Booklist
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