A Brief History of Time Rating: Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: Stephen Hawking Don Taylor Dennis Christopher Mary Brian Complete Cast (7 total)

A Brief History of Time Reviews

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Redundant and Mindbending
'A Brief History of Time' is a film that mixes both the story of Stephen Hawking's life and his theories on quantum physics. At times, it goes through unnecessary stories about Hawking's life; for example, they showed how much he loved Monopoly when he was young. Is this really needed? How many people in the western civilization didn't or haven't played monoply? Nonethless, the movie is mindbending at times, espicially when discussing black holes and the theories of time. Beautiful Philip Glass score, and an inspirational ending.

Interesting developments in science
This short film is about a monumental cosmologist attempting to delve into the unknown in order to know it. It poses the question as to whether there is a God behind the universe or a self-contained boundless system running blindly by its own physical laws (or perhaps there is a God but one who is impersonal to the universe). Today there are two theories about the expansion of the universe. Some believe that it will continue to expand forever while others think it will slow down, contract, and collapse with the cycle continuing infinitely. Hawkings clearly thinks the latter is more plausible. This probably explains his agnostic stance on creationism, while many theologians would naturally be more inclined to reject the theory of a collapsing and expanding universe because it does seem to do away with the idea of a "beginning" and "end." As an ignoramus in the field of physics and cosmology, I found this film to be a good compliment to his book (which is a read somewhat difficult for a person without a background in physics). Hawking's idealism is vibrant as he sounds hopeful that scientists are close to developing a unified theory of the universe that will be explicable not only to philosophers and scientists, but to the average person as well. This films only flaw is that it doesn't have captions telling us who is being interviewed and what their relation is to Stephen, but that's only a minor one at most.

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