Along with Caltech physicist Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk), University of Cambridge cosmologist Hawking (A Brief History of Time) deftly mixes cutting-edge physics to answer three key questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?-- and explains that scientists are approaching what is called "M-theory," a collection of overlapping theories (including string theory) that...

David Swift, a professor at Columbia University, is on the run for his life from the FBI and a ruthless mercenary as he frantically tries to work out an unpublished Einstein theory.