A Brief History of Time

Scientifically one of the best sellers from the 80's, and also published the day I was born, A Brief History of Time is a fascinating read into the origins of the universe, mainly according to the thoughts of many 20th century physicists as written by Stephen Hawking.

While doing so, he speaks most of the time of the big three contributors towards science,
which are Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Reviewing their extraordinary theories, he then proceeds by giving us one of his own.

His sublime thoughts about how black holes could possibly work earned him global recognition and awards for creating a brilliant theory just like that and it changed his reputation into being one of the best contributors of the 20th and 21th centuries.

After concluding on one of the largest mysterious topics for mankind, Hawking switches over to the
human and natural concept of time. Other large topics include the big bang, the string theory, special relativity, wormholes and time travelling, but Hawking is most of all famous for his black hole theory.

The theory explains that general black holes could possibly emit radiation, due to quantum effects near the event horizon. The radiation decreases the mass and energy of the black holes, thus letting them evaporate.

What Stephen also writes about is the so called "theory of everything", or attempting to explain all of the fundamental elements of the laws of nature, so that it can apply to any experiment in any principle. But unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics continues to be one of the unsolved problems in physics.

The four fundamental interactions of the universe, which are the weak and strong nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity, also get mentioned along the chapters. Rounding the book up is when the author occassionally talks about the presence of God, philosophy and how these two can matter with all of these scientific progresses.

The editor deliberately advised Hawking to reduce the number of equations to only one, which happens to be the worldwide known E = mc². This was done so that the large number of normal people including me and most likely you could be able to keep up with the big topics A Brief History of Time offers.

Nevertheless, the book remains a staple of the scientific canon, and its succinct and clear language continues to introduce millions to the universe and its wonders, as quoted by the back of it. And I honestly cannot think of a better way to end this.

Rating: ***(out of 4)