Book Review: Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephan Hawking

@Brief Answers to the Big Questions @天文学 @阅读

Book Review: Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephan Hawking

• Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. (p37)

• An analogy used to describe “negative energy”: Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land, the stuff that he digs has now become the hill with the soil of the digging, and this all perfectly balances out (p34)

• It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don’t need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch. I have no desire to offend anyone of faith, but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator (p35)

I love this. After just reading the first chapter of the book, my heart pounds fast, and my mind starts to wonder in the words of Stephen Hawking.

There are total 10 questions answered in the book. Yet, all of Hawking’s answers are worth pondering upon more deeply and ruminating on more thoroughly.

His writing is very easy to follow, and oftentimes providing other great minds in history that illuminates his idea.

It was a pity to know that he wouldn’t be able to receive a Nobel Prize (due to his area in theoretical knowledge which might lack substantial observational evidence).

His theories, calculations, analyses—are very logical and well-supported. Imagine a mind palace of nature, a building block is attached every time when he lays out former theories, and a greater vision is laid and updated on the sky of the palace directing the way you explore the laws of nature. He illustrates the history of how an idea originated, developed, and sometimes destructed by latest observations and realizations.

The idea that a computer virus should be count as life (p55), fascinates me. From his book, I started to understand physics theory a bit better:

1. Second law of thermodynamics: the total amount of disorder, or entropy, in the universe always increase with time.
2. The Anthropic Principle (strong and weak two versions)
3. The Uncertainty Principle
4. Wave function in quantum mechanics
5. Although quantum mechanics leads to uncertainty when we try to predict both the position and speed (of particles), it still allows us to predict, with certainty, one combination of position and speed. However, the problem arises because gravity can warp space-time so much that they can be regions of space that we can’t observe. (p70)