You might assume that this big-time brainiac, who parks his wheelchair in the offices of Sir Isaac Newton, and is frequently lauded as the world’s most important scientist, would use his big brain to browbeat the soap-opera watching, McDonald’s eating masses into mental submission by publishing a discourse that’s heavy on math, big words, and pomp.
Thank goodness Professor Hawking isn’t that kind of scientist.
Instead, Hawking’s introductory-level book explains the universe - almost all of it - in terms that almost anybody can understand. While he alludes to the math here and there, it’s usually to explain the difficulties that the scientific community itself is having trouble with in cracking key parts of the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
But when it comes to the meat of this book, it’s all available to the casual reader. I believe this comes from Prof. Hawking’s intimate relationship with his science; he views them not as numbers, but as facts about the world around us. Thanks to this, the nature of gravity, questions of time travel, and a myriad list of possible creation theories are easily accessible to anybody with high-school understanding.
The body of work itself is a must for anybody interested in a rational approach to the mysteries that religions fail to satisfactorily explain for an increasing number of thinkers, gnostics, humanists, and even Eastern mysticists. (Check out ’The Self-Aware Universe’ by Dr. Amit Goswami, Ph.D., for one scientist’s view on where cosmology will lead our species in the future.) One can hardly come away from Prof. Hawking’s book without gaining a tremendous new understanding of our universe.