The Universe in a Nutshell is one of Stephen Hawking's books on theoretical physics. It explains to a general audience various matters relating to the Lucasian professor's work, such as Gel's Incompleteness Theorem and P-branes (part of superstring theory in quantum mechanics).

The Universe in a Nutshell is winner of the Aventis Prizes for Science Books 2002. It is generally considered a sequel and was created to update the public of developments since the multi-million-copy bestseller A Brief History of Time published in 1988.