The Playful Genius, Stephen Hawking

In his 1988 best seller A Brief History of Time , Stephen Hawking captivated readers with mind-bending conundrums bound to awaken childlike wonder even among the terminally unimaginative: for instance, if the universe is expanding, where is it expanding to?

Now Hawking has teamed up with his daughter, Lucy Hawking, to write George's Secret Key to the Universe , the first in a trilogy of novels directed at the fertile minds of children themselves. In an interview via e-mail, Stephen Hawking, who holds Sir Isaac Newton's former chair in mathematics at Cambridge University, explains: "The aim of the book...

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