A Brief History of Time-Stephen Hawking

***^1/2/*****                                                                                                   Science

A Brief History of Time

From the Big Bang to Black Holes

            I first read this book a few years back. This was my first book on cosmology and if I remember correctly, I hadn’t read any other book on popular science till then. To me Big Bang was just a very loud and huge explosion. How the heck did this create the universe, was beyond my ken. The big bang singularity where all the extant physical laws break down was way beyond my comprehension. The concept sounded rhetorical but interesting and I memorised it to utter in dinner conversations. In nutshell I then found this book too technical and esoteric. Prose style appeared to me cryptic, the text incoherent and the author incapable of communicating his concepts in a simple language. I carried this opinion of the book for long and eschewed Hawking’s books for next few years. I have read some books on cosmology and physics for lay persons in the intervening years and a couple of books on relativity too. Though I cannot say that I have a perfect understanding of relativity and quantum physics now, but these books have helped me to form an image of such concepts from the little physics that I retain from my school days and that which I glean from these books. I dare say that this is a very immature, unscientific and invariably erroneous picture, but it nevertheless lets me enjoy popular science (specially cosmology) books immensely and I approach every such book with a palpitating heart as if the mysteries of nature and our existence trapped in the book would leap out as soon as I open the book on the first page.

             I recently read Hawking’s ‘The Grand Design’. I liked the book. It was concise, clear and simple. Exactly what I thought his books are not. My readings of other science books-and I cannot resist mentioning Brian Greene’s ‘The Fabric of Cosmos’- surely had helped in furthering my understanding of the difficult concepts and I longed to read ‘A Brief History of Time’ again.

            The book has attained cult status in the history of popular science writing and this time I could appreciate the reasons for this. Stephen Hawking, the most renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist today has produced a marvellous book. It is short but therein lie the skill and author’s perfect understanding of the subject, in that, he has succeeded in covering this vast topic in such short length. He has not left any important topic in cosmology untouched; space and time, the inflationary universe, the elementary particles, black holes, the origin of space, the arrow of time and the grand unification theories, he talks about all. He discusses only relevant facts, but the writing is never superficial or obscure and the flow of thought is maintained throughout. He is often humorous and his prose is effortless. He mentions personal accounts of his research and experiences every now and then, lightening the seriousness of the subject matter. Of the former he has plenty, he being in the forefront of many discoveries and theories described in these pages. His discussion of Black Holes, a topic on which he is the unquestioned authority today, is one of the finest pieces of popular science writing that I have read. The topic is difficult but is presented in a simple and pithy prose without compromising the meaning and import of the text, while saving the reader who is not a student of higher physics and maths the obfuscating and abstruse technical details. Prose which is simple and lucid throughout the book, is poetic at places and beautifully blends with the lofty principles and truths of nature being described. Who can but fail to succumb to the charm of these lines, ‘Even if there is only one possible theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?,,,Why there should be a universe for the model to describe? Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?’

             This is a great book, but should not be the first book on cosmology for the reader.  Once the passion and curiosity for the mysteries of nature and our existence have been awakened, this book goes a long way in improving the understanding and then makes for a riveting read.

Dec 2011