HAWKING, Stephen and R.J. TAYLOR Helium Production in an Anisotropic Big-Bang Cosmology. London: Macmillan (Journals) Ltd. 1966.
8vo. Original cream and orange wrappers; pp, 1271, 1374, Hawking on pp. 1278-9; spine worn and chipped, very good.
This is the 24 year old Hawking's first appearance in Nature, as co-author of a crucial paper that solved one of the great conundra of the new Big Bang Theory because it explained the discrepancy in the abundance of helium between the theory and the amounts actually observed. It was published in the same year that Hawking gained his PhD and is, according to the social media Nature, "the paper that started it all". Hawking's career as a cosmologist and populariser of science did indeed begin here, in a surprisingly accessible paper that argues that not enough mass of the universe is taken up by helium for the Big Bang to have been isotropic (uniform in all directions).
sold with
Scientific American, October 2010, featuring Hawking's article "The (Elusive) Theory of Everything".
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