I had a Physics teacher in my first year at secondary school whose class you could sneak out of when he turned to face the blackboard. He took an extraordinarily long time to say anything. And he rarely showed any emotion, except the occasion when some unfortunate sod dropped a magnet into the iron filings. Then he was flushed faced, apoplectic with a foaming mouth. But for the most part he was extremely dull. He was the stereotypical professor in chalk dusted corduroy and I learnt very little from him. He left me pretty disillusioned about all things science.
But in my second year, or was it the third, I was taught by a post-graduate, who in contrast was a bubbly, buxom, bright-eyed young woman. She hooked me, I vividly remember, when she played Space Oddity by David Bowie at volume 11 in one of her first classes. Imagine that. She told us that that was what “Physics was all about”. We are all made of stars. I was so inspired. She spoke my language. But sadly no amount of meandering with the White Duke meant I was any good at the bloody subject.
So placing “reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking” on my 40for40 list wasn’t an obvious choice. But you know what, something about all that Physics chat gets to me. It takes me back to Major Tom and gets my pulse racing and the hair on my arms standing upright. It freaks me out and excites me all at the same time. The romantics of it. Newton sitting under that apple tree, Archimedes in that bathtub and Einstein’s theorising the universe is expanding… If I hear on the news about how scientists have come up with what happens in a black hole or how many stars are in what section of galaxy, I go mad.
I LOVE it.
It makes my eyes hurt and my mind ache. And I have always thought Stephen Hawking was a bit of a dude to be honest. Especially as he seemed to have a fantastic sense of humour. So when he passed away recently I thought it was about time to that I leave the capsule if I dared and read the book that cemented him as one of our time’s most intellectually gifted, mind-boggling clever people.
“Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for continuing our quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.”
– Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time.
Yup. That right there is why I read it. And I tell you what, having my nose in that book hasn’t half made my loved ones laugh. My parents were amazed, my sister’s eyes rolled and my husband just marvelled. Especially when I state eagerly, just as the Sandman is coming square at him in the later hours of the evening, that the next star from our sun is a mere 4 light years away. He wonders at my enthusiasm and doe-eyed cluelessness.
Whilst I confess this is no extraordinary book review, not even a half decent one, and how even after reading it I still couldn’t tell you much about the history of time, I have learnt a bunch of pretty groovy facts from this amazing read. For instance, did you know that the story of Galileo dropping all those objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa was a myth? Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story after all. But if the sun was the equivalent breadth of the average front door, then the earth would be the just the size of a penny across (that one is true). The furthest object we can see in the universe took 8000 million years for its light to get to us, where as it takes just 8 minutes for the light from the sun to get to us. And don’t even get me started on light travelling at all. And Einstein and E=mc2. I mean what? How? Come again??
Basically the universe is pretty mind bendingly big and I’ve realised that it creeps me out actually thinking about it all too much. Don’t even get me started on Elementary particles. Quarks. Things so small that they cannot be divided.. But only because we have not got the technology to look at them more closing. Or to split them. Yet. What a brain fuck.
There were parts of the book that made me curl my toes into my mattress to try in desperation to hold on to the terra firma of the bed as I imagined the vast nothingness right on the other side of the sky. Our Planet Earth quietly floating through the ether is enough to make your mind get carried away to a land where gravity fails and you simply fall, forever, into blacker than black.
And now that I have finally finished it, after all the mind meddling and brain melting, I have come no closer to being anything other than a casual observe of Physics and it’s marvelous madness. So I’ll stick to the Hitch Hikers Guide instead. Reading anything more scientific makes me feel like I’ve drunk a couple of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters anyway. I might see if I can look at the solar system a bit through a really big telescope one day soon though. That is about the only final frontier I’ll get near. Until then, I’m happy that I’ve read this ridiculous book, but even happier that I can just relax now and listen to Bowie without my grey cells going on strike.
40 for 40 