A brief on the brief history of time

Published on February 5, 2010 in learning. 243 Comments Tags: , , , .

A week ago, I attended a sem­i­nar in my school with the theme of Stephen Hawking’s A brief his­tory of time. Basi­cally, two pro­fes­sors shared their feel­ings and opin­ions towards this book. The talk was intended, like the book itself, to con­tain the least tech­ni­cal knowl­edge required but still be able to explain com­pli­cated, state of the art concepts.

A brief on the brief history of time

I was only a dozen pages in when I attended the talk, so attend­ing the talk actu­ally helped me grasp the big pic­ture of what this book is actu­ally about. Basi­cally, the book tries to dis­cuss cre­ation. How was the world created?

Here’s a list of stuffs it described:

  • Sin­gu­lar­ity – what is it and does it actu­ally exist?
  • Dark matter
  • Hawking’s radiation
  • Gen­eral Rel­a­tiv­ity and Quan­tum Mechanics
  • The stan­dard model to explain the unsolved ques­tions regard­ing the cre­ation of the uni­verse, when using Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­ity and Quan­tum Mechan­ics to explain it
  • Hawking’s own alter­na­tive hypoth­e­sis to the stan­dard model – No bound­ary proposal
  • In 1988, a researcher pub­lished a paper to illus­trate the pos­si­bil­ity of an imag­in­ery time machine. Basi­cally, what he said was that such a machine can fast-​forward time no prob­lem (using worm holes), but can only go back­wards in time after the machine has been invented. That explains why we haven’t seen time trav­el­ers from the future.
  • A lot of things about black holes

In pursuit of the beautiful creation

It’s prob­a­bly not con­veyed enough with words here, but I just failed to under­stand why any human on earth wouldn’t be fas­ci­nated by these beau­ti­ful topics. If there is one thing I’ll fall all over, become crazy and lose my mind about, this is prob­a­bly it. What’s so spe­cial about it? To quote Hawk­ing: if we manage to dis­cover the truth, the cause of our exis­tence, it would be the “ulti­mate tri­umph of human reason – to under­stand the mind of God.”

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