BOOKMARKED: Understanding the language of the universe

A book review on the vastness and tininess of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is everything I wish I learned in high school. I know that an element’s atomic number defined its properties and that energy equals time multiplied by the speed of light squared. However, I never learned in a classroom what purpose scientific and mathematical equations serve in my life and why I should bother learning them at all.

It was not until I grew older and developed an interest in cosmology and astrophysics that I began to value equations — the language of the universe. The numbers that put humans in space; the numbers that found similar particles in earthly creatures and stars; and the numbers that explain why things are the way they are, providing satisfaction to man’s endless curiosities.

Hawking’s tale of time goes deep and broad to explain in great detail the nature of the universe from its vastness to its tininess. He introduces the most complex scientific concepts and ideas to give meaning and understanding to black holes, light cones, and events that stretch to millions and billions of years back. In the acknowledgment section, Hawking states how advisers warned him that the sales for his book would decrease with every equation in it, so he settles with the most important one — Einstein’s famous E=mc², which he hopes will not scare off readers.

Summarily, Hawking’s thesis is that there is no single complete theory that can provide sense to the whole of the universe. However, scientists currently use two partial ones known as The General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, which he believes cannot be both correct in the end as they are known to be inconsistent with each other. The past few centuries introduce altering theories and successively complicating interpretations that Hawking does not hesitate to go into them in full detail. For example, Hawking states how Aristotle believed that all the matter in the universe is made of four basic elements — earth, air, fire, and water. These elements are acted on by two forces, gravity, and levity. Hawking dissects the forces of nature through elementary particles. Interestingly, I learned about the charged elementary particles called quarks. I learned about atoms, molecules, and the nucleus in high school but never about quarks, which apparently make up protons and neutrons and are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. In turn, these said elementary particles consist of internal properties known as spin, which I honestly had trouble understanding as there were variations — spin 1, 0, 2.

“The phenomenon of interference between particles has been crucial to our understanding of the structure of atoms, the basic units of chemistry and biology and the building blocks out of which we, and everything around us, are made.”

I will admit that A Brief History of Time is not easy to read. There were parts I had to underline and reread to comprehend thoroughly. At one point, I felt a little beat up and wondered if I will ever understand all these overwhelming concepts that glut my college of liberal arts brain. Thankfully, each topic in the book follows a thematic structure that helps readers have an organized understanding of the topics. I also appreciate Hawking’s short anecdotes injected in every few paragraphs that show how his career in science conflates with his personal life. His enthusiasm to share his miscalculations and confuted theories also helps break the monotony and provides humanity to his narration. He shares how he once believed that since time moves “forward” at the expansion of the universe, then it is plausible to go “backward” at the Big Crunch (the opposite of the big bang where the entirety of the universe reverts to a singularity). This theory has since been proven wrong (as Hawking admits) when it was found that the collapse and expansion of the universe are not precisely the opposite of each other in a slightly more complicated model.

I started this book with the hope of finding answers to my disturbances about the existence of time as we know it. Earthly creatures as ourselves can travel through whatever coordinates we may desire but never forward or backward when it comes to time. Neil Degrasse Tyson once said that the earliest reckoning of time comes from the things that repeat, such as the earth’s rotation around the sun that gave a day. With that in mind, would time still be real if the earth did not revolve around the sun and humans or any living organisms on this pale blue dot did not exist? Hawking believes that time did not exist before the Big Bang, which I feel remains debatable. Both Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time, which explains that time shall remain consistent (with the help of accurate clocks) from wherever it is measured; they believed that time is independent and separate from space. The Theory of Relativity eventually disproves the concept of absolute time by understanding light and how it moves.

Perhaps the best way to give you a good sense of this book is by providing some of the remarkable scientific theories and discoveries delineated by Hawking. As you will see, A Brief History of Time ranges through various subjects in physics and cosmology that are in some respect simplified yet comes in clear detail.

• Time, as we know it, does not exist. Hawking explains that time is merely a personal and psychological concept that we, earthly creatures, use to measure motion. We see the universe from its past whenever we look up as light from distant stars travels at a finite speed of 168,000 miles per second before it reaches us. He then discusses the no-boundary proposal and delves into the concept of an imaginary time, which transmutes the abstraction of space-time into a 4D space dimension (which is very cool).
• A theory is a theory. Theories reside only in our minds and do not have any other form of reality, Hawking states. They are universally accepted. However, they are not absolute truths that can never be invalidated (flat earthers abuse this definition to a whole new level). As we have all learned in school, hypotheses are educated guesses — like common sense. Scientific theories, on the other hand, are repeatedly tested and verified studies in obedience to the scientific method — in a way, they are probably true. They follow logical reasoning and other specific laws. A theory allows us to predict (with a certain margin of error) and it can always be disproved in the emergence of evidence against it, which explains why our understanding of the universe constantly changes.
• The universe is both chaotic and orderly. Hawking says that the history of science has been a gradual realization that events occur through established underlying orders — much like The Butterfly Effect of the Chaos Theory. However, this does not mean that the universe is entirely deterministic as it discounts the high probability of entropy (disorder) through random occurrences.

Throughout every chapter of the book, Hawking stresses the paramount role of gravity in understanding the universe. Gravity controls light, an observer’s perception of time, the collapse of stars, and even the movement and structure of this seemingly ever-expanding infinite space. A Brief History of Time runs through the whole history of science, from the geocentric cosmologies of Ptolemy to NASA’s modern snapshot of earth that showed us how it is merely a medium-sized planet with an average star in a vast universe.

“The sun and the moon might still be gods, but they were gods who obeyed strict laws, apparently without exceptions, if one discounts stories like that of the sun stopping Joshua.”

If every book is its own universe, then this would have to be my favorite one. I highly recommend this book to curious minds like my own and people who loathe mathematics and fail to see its heterogeneity on an infinite scale. Hawking successfully translates the language of the universe for non-specialists like myself and consolidates all of its peculiarities — from vastness to tininess — in a single book. Upon finishing Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, I feel like I learned a new language — at least the basics of it.