Review: A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I used to look at this book and think that it was written for very smart people who understood math... which I obviously didn't. That's why I never set out to read it. I'm a literature student, and I naively thought that science, especially science as "complicated" as cosmology, was not meant for me. But recently I've had to do some research on astrophysics related stuff and I decided to give myself a chance and just try and read the damn thing. It was popular science book, so it should be simple enough?

HA!

Well, half of it I understood and and the half that I did I probably misinterpreted totally, BUT it was incredibly interesting and I learned so much! Even though somehow I feel LESS smart after reading it, I'm very glad I took the chance. As per the advice of some people, I'm going to be watching documentaries on some of the topics that were most difficult for me; mainly the chapters on quantum and particle physics. I flew through the chapters on black holes, they were super interesting and not quite as hard to wrap my head around.

I'll probably have to read the whole thing again with a pencil in hand and three other books, but I don't regret starting my research with this. If nothing else it taught me that even though I'm bad at math and understand half of what I read, there ain't no such a thing in science as "not for me".

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