A Brief History of Time

I wish I liked this book more. It's an amazing accomplishment, boiling down all of cosmology into a thin, readable book. It succeeds in being accessible to folks without higher mathematics while not dumbing it down too much. It even has human touches, specifically Hawking's occasional appeals to God's role, which isn't religious pandering so much as an acknowledgment that the scientific theories don't explain everything.

But, well, I couldn't follow the whole book. The parts of cosmology I already understand, like the Big Bang and inflationary universes, that I followed completely. And was a little bored, but OK, this isn't new for me. The parts I don't understand, like how time behaves around singularities and the theory of quantum gravity. I still don't understand them, despite Prof. Hawking's best efforts to explain them to me. I don't know if it's because I'm a bad reader (likely), he's a bad writer (unlikely), or if this part of the science just really requires math to understand (definitely). Specifically Hawking can't help but introduce the concept of imaginary time, a mathematical concept, but then he doesn't really follow through with explaining how that works in the equations to make the theories. It's not that book. But I found myself wishing a little it was a bit more mathematical, at least here.

Still the book is an enormous accomplishment. And it's aged pretty well even if some of the theories he describes are no longer in favor. I'm glad I read it.