A Brief History of Time - Mind boggled!

I hadn't meant to read A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, but it was the only book listed in my literary diary for June that I could get electronically from my library, so I thought, what the heck! Purported to be an introduction written for the "man on the street" to the BIG questions ... Was there a beginning of time ... is the universe infinite ... can you travel back in time? ... this book is definitely not for the faint-hearted. It starts with a review of some of the more well known theories about the world in which we live that have been put forward by the titans of the scientific world, such as Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Then we move onto how those theories have been picked up and developed or modified or even contradicted by others, in an effort to help explain the observations man has made that are not explained by the originals. And so we touch on black holes, spiral galaxies, string theory and dark matter. The first couple of chapters I could kind of get my head around, but then things get tougher and tougher. You (or maybe it's just me!) find yourself rereading a passage over and over to try to work out what's going on, but more often than not, it's almost impossible to do so. These are big concepts that are hard to grasp, especially when they introduce aspects that have been put there just to make a theory work ... and then the effort is put into either making observations that will prove or disprove that theory. But that, I suppose is science. Some books are meant to make you think, and this one certainly does, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed it. In fact, I can sum up much of my time when reading this book as follows ...




... yes Goofy, nobody says it better ... Ahurrrh!

My STAR rating: THREE stars (for making my brain work harder than it has for ages!)

Length: 272 print pages.
Price I paid: free, borrowed from library as an ebook.
Formats available: print, audio download, ebook.