In just a few years, Stephen Hawking has become a figure known worldwide, the symbol of the scientific genius. One person in 750 owns his opus Une brève histoire du temps. Here, in an accessible and lively manner, his subsequent thoughts and reflections.

Like many other theoretical physicists, Stephen Hawking is on a quest for the Grail: a unifying theory that is the long-anticipated key to the structure of the universe. Supergravity and supersymmetry, quantum theory and M theory, holography and duality, theories of supercodes and of p-branes: here is a humorous and fantastic look at the avant-garde research in the field by one of its most inventive and audacious experts. Hawking expounds here his vision for arriving at a String Theory that unifies the universe. He also explores the questions of time travel, parallel universes, and other scientific hypotheses.

This work is illustrated and allows non-mathematicians to better understand the strange world of physicists, a world made up of particles or strings in numerous dimensions, of black holes that appear and disappear, of parallel universes that fold upon themselves, all of which is ultimately merely the products of the explosion of a tiny peanut.

Stephen Hawking is a professor at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays .