And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do. His main goal is to give an overview of the subject, but he also attempts to explain some complex mathematics. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking explains a range of subjects in cosmology, including the Big Bang, black holes and light cones, to the non-specialist reader. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein’s famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. In this book are lucid revelations on the frontiers of physics, astronomy, cosmology and courage. As interesting as the book’s wide-ranging contents is the glimpse it provides into the workings of its author’s mind. This, Hawking’s first book for the non-specialist, holds rewards of many kinds for the lay audience. Hawking is now the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post once held by Newton and later by Paul Dirac, two celebrated explorers of the very large and the very small. There are even children, and I have met some of them, who want to know what a black hole looks like what is the smallest piece of matter why we remember the past and not the future how it is, if there was chaos early, that there is, apparently, order today and why there is a universe. Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.

We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world.

Hawking a brief history of time