The Universe in a Nutshell is one of Stephen Hawking's books on theoretical physics. It explains to a general audience various matters relating to the Lucasian professor's work, such as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and P-branes (part of superstring theory in quantum mechanics). It tells the history and principles of modern physics. He brings us behind the scenes of the most intellectual tales as he seeks to "combine Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Richard Feynman's idea of multiple histories into one complete unified theory that will describe everything that happens in the universe."

The Universe in a Nutshell is winner of the Aventis Prizes for Science Books 2002. It is generally considered a sequel and was created to update the public concerning developments since the multi-million-copy bestseller A Brief History of Time published in 1988.

Contents

A Brief History of Time
The Shape of Time
The Universe in a Nutshell
Predicting the Future
Protecting the Past
Our Future? Star Trek or Not?
Brane New World
Conclusion
Glossary
Index