1.
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
January 11 - January 31 2018
“turtles all the way down”
Reading this book has been a long time dream for me, and while it took a series of unfortunate events to get to this point, I’m glad I finally picked it up and gave it a go. I was excited to devour its contents from the get-go, but I had no idea it would take so much out of me to read and comprehend every sentence. Here is a girl who’s failed every Physics class (and eventually just dropped the subject altogether from the age of 15) trying to grasp some of the most core concepts of theoretical physics. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, Hawking weaves in discussions on philosophy and religion, questioning the universe’s nature through the eyes of both science and religion.
I really liked the book, even though sometimes it felt like too much work to read and I could only get through a handful of pages at a time. Hawking constantly questioned the birth of the universe, what determines the world around us, and yet suggests that there could still conceivably be a God, just one that we don’t fully understand yet. There were also many metaphors sprinkled throughout the book as he tries to explain complex concepts, and for the most part they really did help my understanding of the theory. Admittedly, my memory from a bunch of sci-fi films was also a huge help in visualising things like black holes and the expansion of the universe.
I liked how Hawking could admit he was wrong as he discovered new theories that overrode his old ones. How he constantly acknowledged that we, as we are right now, are incredibly limited in our knowledge of the universe and that the only certainty is our uncertainty. To be honest, it doesn’t give you much to go on when you’re reading this book trying to understand the universe as these academics have and you’re just met with even more confusion and open-ended rhetoric, but it does put you in the right frame of mind to think “yeah, what I know may not really be what I know”.
In the penultimate chapter, Hawking discusses how in Newton’s time, it was possible for a learned person to have an outline of the entirety of human knowledge, but that this is no longer possible due to the pace of the development of science today. That the rate of progress is now so rapid that what we learn at school or university is always a bit out of date, and that the general population has little idea of the advances that are being made or the excitement they are generating. I had never looked at knowledge this way, but now I feel a renewed vigour to keep learning as much as I possibly can, to read and read widely, just to strengthen my grasp of what little proportion of humanity’s knowledge is within my reach. There is so much yet unknown.
“…if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone… then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God.”