'A Brief History of Time' - Thoughts on the great work

I have heard great things about ‘A Brief History of Time’. It has been on my reading list for as long as I can remember. I can tell with absolute certainty that this book deserves all the praise it gets.

I had a collection of facts, partial understanding of some concepts and theories, and titbits of information about astrophysics stowed away in my head. This book not only aided me in organising the knowledge and making connections, but also taught me how a scientist would go about using information such as this and experimental data to create theories and hypothesize. I must admit that I was quite struck by the length and nuance of the verbal arguments and chains of thought Hawking embarks upon in the book; being more used to equations, formulae and numbers, these quasi-philosophical discussions and ‘proofs’ gave me substantial discomfort. But the more I think about it, I realise more the effectiveness of this kind of reasoning. The mathematics will let one make predictions (limited, as Hawking never forgets to remind us, by the uncertainty principle), but on the journey to creating a big model of the universe or uncovering the theory of everything, this method of posing verbal hypotheses and proving them using logical steps and mathematics makes more sense. It is similar to proof in mathematics, but just a bit, dare I say, oddly different. 

I loved how Hawking assumes no prior knowledge, but does not hesitate to delve deep into the big problems and dilemmas of physics and the origins, structure and fate of the unverse. I now have a low-level introductory understanding of General relativity (Hawking has given by far the best explanation of the theory in layman’s terms I have ever seen), string theory, particle spin, quantum physics and much more. Of all the topics covered I found most interesting the quantum theory of gravity, and how integrating quantum effects gives rise to a spehrical, uniform model of the universe in imaginary time, where the big bang, the hypothesised ‘big crunch’ and all other events are kind of similar in behaviour. I am aware of the fact that my understanding from the book might be dangerously incomplete and riddled with inaccuracies, but it has done enough to pique my interest in these matters. But one thing I just cannot bring myself to understand, however many times I pore over the chapter, is why travelling faster than light is equivalent to travelling backwards in time in relativity. It was possible to create somewhat of an intuition for all the other things explained in this book; this is the only one one I have failed to come to terms with yet. 

The explanations offered in ‘A Brief History of Time’ are pure gold. Some parts definitely warrant intense focus and repeated reading, but the depth of the understanding gleaned makes the enterprise worth the effort.