A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. [...] We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every several hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized yellow star, near the inner edge of one of the spiral arms. We have certainly come a long way since Aristotle and Ptolemy, when we thought that the earth was the center of the universe!

-A Brief History of Time 

Well. Sometimes I get these fancy ideas about what I should be reading. Reading Age of Wonder* reminded me of how much I enjoyed learning about astronomy in college, and it seemed time to delve back into that field. I also thought of how much I like Doctor Who and figured it might be interesting to learn some of the science behind, say, time travel. I remembered hearing about A Brief History of Time, which looked slim and fairly unintimidating when I picked it up from the library. What I didn't take into consideration was that even a layman's guide to astronomy would be way over my head.

Stephen Hawking makes a valiant effort to present things as plainly as possible, but the fact remains that you can only make something like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle so simple--it's a pretty abstract concept for a layperson, as are many of the concepts in discussed in A Brief History of Time. Hawking peppers the text with jokey asides (and has an endearing fondness for exclamation points), but my head was still swimming a lot of the time. There were some concepts that he illustrated pretty clearly: I thought using the ping pong game on a train to talk about relativity was very clear, and I liked his use of the Earth's surface to help explain the boundaries (or lack thereof) in the universe. But when he talked about gluons and the spin of antiparticles and what color a certain quark was, my eyes had a tendency to glaze over.

Still, I don't feel entirely defeated. I'm wondering if there's some other book out there that might be even more simplistic. Or perhaps if I read the same ideas again, a few more of them would click. I'm not by any means a science person, but I'm willing to try--it reminds me of the early days in my AP Physics class in high school, when I optimistically thought I might be good at physics. I think it lasted 3 weeks, tops. After that, things went downhill--aside from the unit on something to do with the moon (I'm hazy on the particulars), which I inexplicably understood quite well. So there's that.

Up next: Already finished Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz, which was quite a change of pace. 

*There's that book again! The book that launched a thousand books, it seems.