Another great classic to add to my knowledge base!
A Brief History of Time was a London Times bestseller for 237 weeks when it came out in 1988 — and I can see why. Hawking explains incredibly difficult topics with clarity and grace. While I’ve already read and watched countless books and documentaries on quantum mechanics and the origins of the universe, this book deepened my understanding more than anything else so far.
Some of the concepts are still beyond me, but I’m closer than before. I won’t pretend I fully grasp everything Hawking discusses, but I’ll share some highlights and takeaways.
🪐 The Beginning of Everything
The universe began from an unimaginably small, dense point of energy — what we call The Big Bang. From there it expanded, like a balloon inflating. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, all of it simply spread out into space. Small variations in this distribution gave rise to galaxies, stars, planets, and black holes.
We can’t determine what happened before the Big Bang — there’s no evidence to measure, so scientists don’t speculate.
We know the universe is largely uniform thanks to the cosmic background radiation — faint heat leftover from the Big Bang. Advances in technology have confirmed this uniformity again and again with increasing precision.
⏳ Time & Entropy
Time and the “flow” of it is something most people take for granted — but why does it move the way it does?
Hawking ties time to entropy — the property that all systems tend toward disorder over time.
He gives memorable examples:
- Gas in a balloon will always spread out and mix, never spontaneously unmix.
- A coffee cup falling and shattering — the pieces don’t reassemble themselves back into a perfect cup.
- A jigsaw puzzle in a box, if shaken, will get more disordered, not more complete.
Our brains also intuitively understand this. If you saw a video of a shattered cup reassembling, you’d know it was running backward.
Reading this book itself seems like it might contradict entropy — after all, the reader gains order (knowledge). But that’s not the case: while the brain becomes more “ordered,” the body burns energy, releases heat, and the environment becomes more disordered overall. When you account for everything, the universe as a whole becomes more disordered — entropy always increases.
Eventually, millions or billions of years from now, the universe will reach maximum disorder — no particles, planets, or atoms — just randomness.
🌌 Other Fascinating Topics
Hawking touches on many other mind-expanding ideas:
- Black holes — regions of space with gravity so strong not even light escapes.
- Dark energy — mysterious forces driving the expansion of the universe.
- String theory — a possible framework for uniting all physical laws.
- Time travel & faster-than-light travel — theoretically explored but not proven.
- The search for a Unified Theory — combining general relativity and quantum mechanics into one elegant explanation of everything.
This book was a dense but fascinating read. At only about 200 pages, it still took me a long time to finish — not because it was dull, but because the concepts require time to absorb.
Although some ideas have since been updated or disproved since it was written, much has been confirmed through experiments and observations.
If you have a curious mind, I highly recommend A Brief History of Time.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5/5 stars)
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