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.”
