52+2 Deck Draw #7: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME by Stephen Hawking ⭐⭐⭐

Can you believe there are people out there thinking about this stuff and understanding it well enough to theorize and solve it? They are answering the questions of existence like it’s simply an issue of mathematics. Science will never stop blowing my mind.

Scientists like Hawking are the real rockstars of history. We think we know how something fundamental like the earth’s relationship to the sun works, and then someone like him manages to think of it in a profoundly novel way, and boom, our entire understanding of the fabric of reality is flipped on its head. I went in knowing much of the main message, but damn is it trippy reading it from the source.

I will say, all credit due to Hawking for taking the time to write this incredible book and disseminate complicated physics information to the general public, forty years further in space-time means there are other options for exposure to the same theories. Ones maybe more entertaining that don’t bog down on the extreme details. Books and movies like Three Body Problem and Interstellar both take Hawking’s theories on space travel and the grand questions of the universe and insert them into narratives with a science fiction flourish. I was surprised reading this how much it reminded me of the best moments from those. I know they have differing goals than this book, but it’s something worth noting for anyone thinking of reading this from start to finish.

If there’s any main point to appreciate besides the absolute genius of Stephen Hawking, it’s his attempt to compress these heady ideas into palatable bites for the rest of us. I was still fantastically lost through much of it, but it’s a noble effort. It reads almost like your physics professor wrote your class textbook, and also happens to understand the subject matter better than anyone else in the world. And while it’s often dense and repetitive and too much for my brain, learning about the beginning, middle, and potential end of the universe is an experience worth having.

Makes you wonder: if we’ve figured out this much, what other fantastic things will we uncover?