Category: Non-fiction; Rating: 3 out of 5; Tags: Cosmology, Physics
Published in 1988, Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” has a reputation as a book frequently bought, but seldom read. I certainly contributed to that reputation – I received the book as a gift shortly after it was published, and after a single unsuccessful attempt to read it, left it to languish on my shelves for over thirty years. That has now changed, and I can proudly join the ranks of the few who have actually read the book from cover to cover.
The book covers the history of cosmological thinking from Galilean and Newtonian physics (in which objects move in space and time in response to forces), through the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics (in which time is not absolute, gravity is a distortion of spacetime, and there are unavoidable uncertainties in certain pairs of measurements). Two chapters explain the origin of black holes and their characteristics, and the final chapters address the fate of the universe, explain why we experience time as moving in one direction and not the other, and discuss the potential to unify the theories of electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces with a relativistic theory of gravity, perhaps using string theory. After the conclusion, there are brief biographies of Einstein, Galileo, and Newton, which are somewhat odd. The note about Einstein focusses on his role in politics, anti-nuclear campaigning, and Zionism; the one about Newton begins by saying, “Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man,” and highlights his disputes with other scientists.
The subtitle is quite explanatory – time, according to cosmological theory, begins with the big bang and ends in a black hole, at least for large enough collapsing stars and anything else that falls into one. These two singularities mark, in a sense, the boundaries of time.
Hawking doesn’t hide the messy nature of science, with its false starts and blind alleys. Having worked hard to convince the scientific community that there really was a singularity at the time of the big bang, he then changed his mind and worked to convince people that quantum effects meant there didn’t have to be a singularity.
Thirty years after the first attempt at reading it, it’s good to find the book humorous, clearly written and not too intimidating after all.
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