A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking, who died earlier this year, was one of the smartest men in the world. Can a man who thinks on another plane than the rest of us explain the mysteries of the universe so that the layman can understand? Yes and no.

Hawking's major work for us mortals was A Brief History of Time, first published in 1988. It put Hawking in the public light, and he went on to take part in pop culture, ranging in appearances on The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory. The book has sold more than 10 million copies, and Hawking updated it a few times with new knowledge.

I am fascinated by astronomy, but there are things that I could never understand if you gave me a million years to think about them. Hawking, who makes a noble attempt to dumb down for people like me, succeeds about half the time. There are just some ideas that I can't grasp.

But Hawking does make many things clear, or at least clearer. "What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time?" These are the essential questions of mankind, at least for the scientifically curious, and it's amazing to me that anyone was able to figure it out. Hawking discusses the beginning of the universe, which is the Big Bang Theory (not the TV show), that replaced Einstein's supposition that the universe was stable. "The discovery that the universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century. With hindsight, it is easy to wonder why no one had thought of it before." Through much of the book he writes about The Big Crunch, which supposes that the universe will eventually start to contract back into a singularity that it started as, but in the appendix he admits that the was wrong, and that it appears the universe will continually expand forever.

That's one thing that makes scientists more reliable than any spiritualist--they admit their mistakes. Hawking was always taking bets on things. He once bet an American on something and the loser would buy the winner an encyclopedia: "When I conceded, John asked for an encyclopedia of baseball, which I duly gave him. (My attempt to persuade him that cricket is more interesting was unsuccessful.)"

Hawking has a few major topics. His specialty was black holes, and this topic is covered especially well. I never quite grasped what an event horizon was before, now I know what it is. The idea that we even know black holes exist is amazing: "How could we hope to detect a black hole, as by its very definition it does not emit any light? It might seem a bit like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar. Fortunately, there is a way. As John Michell pointed out in his pioneering paper in 1783, a black hole still exerts a gravitational force on nearby objects. Astronomers have observed many systems in which two stars orbit around each other, attracted toward each other by gravity. They also observe systems in which there is only one visible star that is orbiting around some unseen companion."

He also tantalizes with the notion of time travel. Many people discount the possibility of such a thing because of the paradox--if I go back and kill my father before I am born, do I disappear? Hawking wonders if time travel ever becomes possible, why hasn't anyone come from the future to tell us about it? Maybe those time travelers are what we refer to as aliens, but then notes: "I think that any visit by aliens or people from the future would be much more obvious and, probably, much more unpleasant. If they are going to reveal themselves at all, why do so only to those who are not regarded as reliable witnesses? If they are trying to warn us of some great danger, they are not being very effective."

One thing about the book troubled me. Hawking does not discount the possibility of a higher being creating the universe. I would have thought Hawking would have been an atheist--the more one knows about the universe, the more one would realize that God has nothing to do with it. I don't know if he includes God in the equation not to piss off the religious or whether he was a believer. At any rate, he does point out one of the conundrums about believing in God and the Big Bang. If God created the universe, what was he doing before? Has he existed forever, or did he have to have a beginning as well? Does God exist outside of time?

At times there is also a bit too much gee whiz in Hawking's style--the man loved exclamation points. But mostly I enjoyed the book, as it tickles the brain and makes one think things that while I'm not smart enough to figure out, many scientists are working on, such as wormholes, that could allow for long distance travel without going faster than the speed of light (Hawking is firm about nothing being able to go faster than light, sorry science-fiction fans). And it's very difficult to grasp the idea of the universe stretching on for infinity. We know it's at least 13 billion light years wide, as that is the distance of the farthest known star. As my father used to ask me, if the universe ends at some point, what's on the other side?