The modern genre of pop cosmology began with the big bang of Stephen Hawking’s 1988 megabestseller, A Brief History of Time. Since then, world-class physicists like Michio Kaku, Steven Weinberg, and Freeman Dyson, who died earlier this year at the age of 96, have earned wider fame by writing popular accounts of fundamental physical concepts: time and space, matter and energy, the origin and destiny of the universe. – Tablet