A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
February 10 2008 William writes:
A discussion of the history, purpose, and future of the Universe we live in. The topics covered include black holes, the big bang, the nature of time, God, and the quest to find a grand unified theory of everything. Even though the book was written for non-scientists I had trouble comprehending some of the concepts Hawking mentions.
Some excerpts and thoughts from the book
The net energy in the universe is zero. p136
This is because the negative gravitational energy exactly equals the positive energy in form of mass (E=mc2). It is only the unevenly distributed thermodynamic entropies that allow humans to extract energy for useful purposes. The energy is gradually becoming more evenly distributed and the extraction of useful energy will become harder as the Universe gets older.
God did not have many choices when building the universe. p184
While God had infinite choices to make the universe, only a small number of those choices, maybe only one, would support the development of intelligent life as we know it. Hawking backs this up by saying if the strength of the force of gravity was only slightly stronger, planets would spiral into stars and the stars would burn out too quickly or if gravity was a little weaker planets would not orbit at all and stars would not have been hot enough.
“If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed before it ever reached its present size.” p128
This is another example of the limited choices that God had when creating the universe.
It takes about ten thousand million years to develop intelligent life. p131
The universe will start to contract in ten thousand million years. Intelligent life could not exist during the contracting phase of the universe because all the stars will have burned out. p158-160
This gives us at lease some time constraint for understanding the universe completely.
In Newton’s time it was possible for an educated person to grasp the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then the pace of development of science has made this impossible. p178
Reading text is no longer a sufficient mechanism for transferring information. There needs to be faster and more efficient method of transferring and utilizing the information available from historic scientific advances. My proposal is a modeling program that allows anyone to use everyone else’s expertise. I am also open to any suggestions.
Categories: Books
arthur on 01 Sep 2008 at 8:45 am #
this is actaully very easy to read, not like how andy was telling me