SOURCE: "On the Wilder Shores of Cosmology," in Nature, Vol. 379, No. 6563, January 25, 1996, pp. 309-10.

In the following excerpt, Rowan-Robinson remarks favorably on The Nature of Space and Time.

Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose are well-known both for their work on the nature of black holes and for successful books for the general public. The Nature of Space and Time has its origin in a series of lectures that they gave at a study programme in 1994 at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. They outline their past and current work on the global causal structure of space-time, singularity theorems, cosmic censorship, the laws of blackhole dynamics, quantum black holes, Schrödinger's cat paradox, the no-boundary proposal, the arrow of time, and the twistor view of space-time. This is an extremely demanding book, with many equations, and requires some knowledge of general relativity and quantum theory. The main theme of...