Stručnější historie času – Schulman Eric (2018)

The title of the satirical and popular science book by American astronomer Eric Schulman unmistakably references the famous book by Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988, Czech edition 1991), which represents a representative and brilliantly written scientific book about the origin and development of the universe. Schulman's gesture is undoubtedly an expression of admiration for his colleague. It is worth reading Hawking's book alongside Schulman's, as we can compare the fundamental ideas about the meaning of the universe and life on Earth that underpin the 'serious' and the 'comic' interpretations. Schulman also interprets the history of the universe and the emergence and development of life on Earth, but he does so with humor, ironic shortcuts, and a wealth of literary paraphrases and allusions from the Book of Genesis through W. Shakespeare, The Beatles, to S. W. Hawking himself. In Schulman's collage, we also find discussed notions that the development of the universe is guided as a form of entertainment by alien cosmic forces, the idea that the evolution of life on Earth is about fulfilling a plan by one paleontological species to dominate the Earth, or the lightly ironized sci-fi motif of Earth as an object of observation and intervention by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Schulman's book is a classic in the field of humorous or...