I want to start off this review by saying I listened to the audiobook of Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” and I’m very thankful I did. While Hawking does a good job describing the extraordinary laws of physics to which he has dedicated his life in a way that can be understood by an ordinary person, I don’t know if I would have been able to power through the book had I been reading on my own. The inflection and emphasis in the audiobook brought the concepts alive for me and helped me visualize them in a way that words on a page likely could not have done. However, the downside of listening to a complex book in audiobook form is that it can be very easy to tune out. The man reading the audiobook was Michael Jackson (not that one), and his voice is soothing, but at times perhaps too much so that I found my thoughts drifting off. You really need to focus when reading or listening to this book because the concepts presented are so huge, you need to dedicate your full mental capacity to processing them. I would even go so far as to discourage listening while driving, as you may become distracted by the number of times Hawking uses the words “body” and “particle," not to mention the extreme vastness of the universe.

In this book, Hawking takes the reader on a journey through space and time from the infinitely massive to the infinitely small and infinitely dense. He explores big questions like if time existed before the Big Bang, if black holes have a color, what happens if someone falls into a black hole, will the universe ever stop expanding and start contracting, are there multiple universes, and is there a universal “quantum theory of space/time” that can explain everything from the minute quarks and electrons that make up atoms to the vast scale of the cosmos.

Prepare to flex your brain muscles if you choose to read this book. There were several instances where I had to pause the audiobook to ponder what the heck just happened. What is the “future light cone of an event?” How is it that some particles don’t look the same if you spin then exactly 100% of the way around, but do look the same after spinning them 200% of the way around? How could the universe have been infinitely dense and occupy 0 size in the instant before the Big Bang? Did anything (including time) exist before the Big Bang? Who or what initiated the Big Bang?

Overall, the book was confusing and inspiring, especially now that Hawking has passed away. It is stunning to get this glimpse into his mind and be in awe at the knowledge of another person, and really shocking that his mind is no longer with us. I will need to listen to this book probably several more times before I will feel even a fraction of the way to understanding the vastness of scientific knowledge and the minds that study it.

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Created Jan 27, 2019 at 1:17pm • Submit your own review...