A Brief History of Time - Hawking

I have been reading a new book about quantum physics that I cannot enjoy.   The book has so much promise but falls so short that I have been frustrated and miserable for days.  I needed to take a break.  Part of why I have been so irritated is that my knowledge of physics has waned in recent years…enter Steven Hawking and his classic, “A Brief History of Time”.  I figured I could brush back up on relativity, black holes, cosmology, and quantum physics all at once…and perhaps get more excited about this new book that hangs around my neck like a dead albatross, in order to finish it.  

Well Hawking has not disappointed me.  His classic contains everything necessary to rekindle a childlike wonder about our past, present, and future and the awe inspiring notion that should we ever reduce the universe to a single equation that unifies physics we will know the mind of God!  His book is a truly incredible work, now some 20 years old and not trivial for those who haven’t considered space-time previously, but a magnificent explanation for why such things matter…and of greater concern, why we should continue to seek answers to these questions.   Not that the physics of the very large, or the physics of the very small, will ever matter in our everyday lives, except when some jackass know-it-all at a dinner party starts talking about the possibility of black holes and time travel…tell them to get a clue and go read Hawking’s…but because it throws open the possibility that our search for answers, will not lead to absolute answers, but to the discovery of those things that currently lay beyond human comprehension, such was the case before we discovered that the earth actually orbits the sun.  Since, as Hawking predicted, but very humbly suggested he might be wrong, those discoveries were not made in the previous century, revolution must still loom just beyond the horizon.  That is exciting.