The birth of popular cosmology
A Brief History of Time can undoubtedly be regarded as the moment when the genre of popular science (especially popular cosmology) writing came into its own and came to be accepted by the general audience. And that was principally because of the sheer profundity with which Hawking explained concepts that had hitherto been limited to the scientific community.
It is not that popular cosmology books had not been written before. A good example is The First Three Minutes, by 1979 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Steven Weinberg. However, the way A Brief History of Time captured the imagination of the masses was unprecedented, and it is hard to find any subsequent book that has managed to do the same.
The book tried to tackle questions that are fundamental for every human, yet which take a back-seat in our everyday lives. Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Is the universe endless? Was there a beginning of time? What is our place in the universe? Spend a few minutes staring at the night sky, preferably in a region where air pollution and smog aren’t restricting your view of the heavens, and you will find these questions resonating in some corner of your brain that has long been subdued to social networking, monthly bills and an overload of irrelevant information.
My interest in popular cosmology started when I read Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, where he discussed the possibility of the existence of higher dimensions. That was followed by The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which was on String Theory. I read a few more books, even read A Briefer History of Time by Hawking, which is an abridged version of this book, but somehow never got around to picking up the original one.
Having read other books on cosmology, I am now in a position to appreciate what really makes A Brief History of Time so good.
One of the more conspicuous tendencies of modern authors is to repeat things. You find yourself reading some paragraph, and suddenly realising that you had read something similar, if not identical, around a hundred and fifty pages back. Of course it is not like entire sentences are copied, but that whiff of familiarity is unquestionable.
It is not that A Brief History of Time does not have repetitions. But at least its repetitions don’t seem trivial – in contrast with those found in other books. For example, consider two questions – the existence and implications of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (a uniform radiation observed to be coming from all directions in the universe, and without much variation in its intensity, at a few degrees above absolute zero) and the relative abundance of force and matter particles in the universe.
In both these questions, cosmic inflation (the very initial phase in the life of the universe when, according to this hypothesis, the universe expanded extremely fast, leading to certain large scale (relative) uniformities that we observe in the universe at present) concept will need to be discussed. So although this amounts to repetition, the context in which that concept is now going to be discussed is different.
Considering the kinds of ideas that are presented in the book, Hawking does a very fine balancing job. The writing is concise and to-the-point. Hawking spends as much time on any given topic as is needed to properly explain it, and then quickly moves on to the next one. As a result, the process of reading this book has its own rhythm. Hawking doesn’t try to stretch a two hundred and fifty page book into a three hundred page one.
The one big complaint I have with Hawking is his introduction of God in the narrative. The first time he used the word, well into the second half of the book, it felt more like a restrained tongue-in-cheek comment. However, his repeated use of the word soon changed this feeling and I felt like he was saying something he actually believed in. In the few instances where he delves into the possible powers his deistic conception of god may have – for example at the beginning of the universe; or on the nature of choice he had while choosing the kind of physical laws the universe could have had to start out with – I momentarily sensed a positive Galilean twinge in his tone.
Nevertheless, reading A Brief History of Time , I felt I was back in the wonderland called cosmology which had first captivated me eight years ago in school. It was a pleasure to read it, except a couple of chapters which really went above my head, and it is going to delight any reader who likes the genre of popular science. This book opened the floodgates and paved the way for a genre where writers aim to explain the most difficult concepts at the frontiers of science to lay people, without resorting to equations at all. And thirty years back, Hawking had taken the first steps in a commendable fashion.