Stephen Hawking’s most famous book, as most readers know, is A Brief History of Time. This brilliant scientific work in layman’s language received rare accolades, not to mention the millions of copies of the book which were sold across the globe. I personally own a copy of the same but have never had the rigour to finish it, as my understanding of the concepts explored by the author were not extensive enough, to say the least. However, I found a worthier, and a simpler contender in a recent work of his, Brief Answers To The Big Questions, which was the last book he wrote and finished, before his passing away in 2018.
The book mainly focuses on ten questions – an overview of the queries he used to face from the general public and the scientific community. From these, three stood out in my mind, but I found that all ten of them impacted me in some way or the other. This may be because the book heavily draws from his personal experiences and how the major scientific discoveries up until his death affected him singularly. His sense of humour is also prevalent among these pages. For example, he placidly states at one point that his birthday is 300 years after the death of the great astronomer Galileo Galilei but assures us this has had no bearing on how his life turned out to be. The reason being, he mentions wryly, he doesn’t know if the approximately 200,000 babies were also born that day grew up to pursue astronomy.
The first question which caught my attention was “is time travel possible”? Professor Hawking starts by describing the geometry of our world, and how despite us perceiving it to be three dimensional, it may not be limited to only so. Einstein’s general theory of relativity is introduced, which combines both physical space and time into a four-dimensional entity known as spacetime and confirms that everything we see and measure is only relative to us. This culminates into the theory and the eventual evidence for the fact, that gravity can distort space-time, just as it distorts mass and energy. Logically, if gravity can distort time itself, it can allow us to travel through different instances of time. Another way of approaching time travel is how moving at great speeds and time travelling are essentially the same thing because relative to a person moving at slower speeds, time is shorter for high-speed travellers. A wormhole, or a warp in spacetime that is big enough to create a closed-loop between two points, can be used to achieve these kinds of speeds, which according to Einstein are always going to be lesser than the speed of light, i.e this cannot make spacetime malleable enough to allow time travel into the past. Finally, Professor Hawking introduces String Theory, which in simplified terms condenses the entire universe into rubberband-like structures under high tension, high enough to make them at or above the speed of light. Thus, this yet unconfirmed theory could be the solution to time travel, as their high tension and high speeds could distort reality to such a degree that spacetime “curves back on itself”.
The second question which interested me was, “Is there another intelligent life in the universe”? He introduces how incredibly complex we have become to consider this question in the first place, as we started as mere chemical reactions at the bottom of the ocean and presently are a species capable of cognitive thought. He assumes life on other planets to start equally as simply and thinks that it would take millions of years for it to achieve this level of sophistication, similar to us. The composition and functions of DNA are explored and compared to the elements around us during the age where Earth was a molten rock, and how they could have similarly developed on other planets. Professor Hawking considers life and by extension intelligent life to be commonplace throughout the universe because of its sheer size, but has differing views regarding whether we should make them aware of our existence or not. Taking the example of humans colonizing different continents, he believes the chances of an extraterrestrial race doing the same to us upon first contact to be high enough.
The final question which I want to expand upon is why we must ask the big questions in the first place. Here he chronicles his journey from a smart child in an even smarter class, to his work at Oxford College, then his application to Cambridge, and how he was eventually diagnosed with ALS, a motor neurone disease which halted the victim’s motor functions --- this decreed Professor Hawking an early death, and made him lose his will to pursue anything in life. However, he saw each day as an extraordinary prospect to accomplish something new, and with the help of his loved ones and a few technological experts willing to help, slowly climbed back up and proceeded on with his life. He justified his renewed will to live as such: he asks the big questions because when he would eventually find answers to them, he would fight to make the world a better place to live for future generations. In fact, his approaching death gave him a greater appreciation for life as a whole. Until that fateful day, every single, finite, ticking moment was a colossal opportunity to explore those burning questions which intrigued him.
Brief Answers to the Big Questions is a fascinating book that is delivered in lucid terms for novices in physics (like myself) to read and reflect on. The book adds value by delivering through personal anecdotes and covers extremely complex scientific topics thoroughly in only ten questions. It is a book worth revisiting periodically and I highly recommend this book to anyone who is enthralled by the endless mysteries spun by our beautiful universe.
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