Using the highlights feature of Amazon Kindle, Jordan Ellenberg compiled a list of the most popular e-books that people buy but never finish.
And, Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ is right there, among the top-books, which are celebrated by many, but read by hardly any.
On Wall Street Journal’s website, as I read Ellenberg’s analysis, I immediately thought of the time I had purchased this book myself; an Indian paperback edition.
It was in 1990 I think, when I embarked on this ambitious project of reading Hawking’s book.
Ambitious, because I was barely 23 then.
For a graduate in mathematics and physics – which I was, by then – and for someone who had read books of over 1100 pages – like Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’, which I’d read, by then - this non-fiction bestseller of just 250 pages seemed like an easy task. Just a brief, well, a matter of time.
But, try as I might, despite all that which our over-passionate Physics professor at the university had pumped into our heads - including the Theory of Relativity with its ‘length contraction’ and ‘time dilation’ concepts - I must confess, I had to abandon the book midway.
This book even had lots of beautiful pictures and diagrams explaining concepts like time-warp, uncertainty principle and string theory.
It is, however, another matter that the images had lacked the power to penetrate the thick skull I was blessed with.
Therefore, I soon gravitated, into my own universe. Against the book. And, today, I am completely unaware of my book's current physical coordinates.
The book, we can infer, was simply unable to escape the pull of a black hole, somewhere.
But, as an Indian, I particularly remember from the book, Stephen Hawking’s appreciation for the work done by the Indian-American Astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
As far back as in 1930s, Chandrasekhar had studied what would happen if Einstein's special theory of relativity was applied to the processes that occur inside stars; and eventually proved that a star really could collapse, and fall into a black hole.
Chandrashekar had won the shared Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983. The very year Hawking's book was released.
So, we can say that Hawking’s appreciation of Chandrashekar’s path-breaking work had come much before that of the Swedish Academy.
It was in 2008, in the Awali Library, here in Bahrain, that I had stumbled on ‘The Universe in a Nutshell’ by Stephen Hawking.
Published in 2001, this book - which is generally considered a sequel to the multi-million-copy bestseller ‘A Brief History of Time’ – was standing seductively in the bookshelf. Staring at me.
I took it out. I leafed through its pages, which were rich with colourful photos and illustrations. And falling to its charms, brought it home.
But unable to make sense of many concepts, I must admit, I returned the book without reading most of it.
However, my troubled relationships with two of Hawking’s books did not deter me; from making a third attempt.
In 2016, I purchased Stephen Hawking’s ‘The Grand Design’ (2010) co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow.
I had doubted myself, but the book was so well-written, targeting those with even basic knowledge of science, that I was able to complete it.
From Viking stories of Skoll and Hati, the wolves which cause eclipses (like Rahu and Ketu, in the Hindu Mythology) to the latest analysis of the Theory of Everything and M-theory, it explains the growth of scientific knowledge, and asks if God is really needed in the creation of ‘multiverse’, or many universes.
Whether we read Hawking's books or not, and whether we agree with him or not, we know one thing for sure.
In our lifetime, we will never see another 'Superstar of Science', like him.
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Some related weblinks.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-a-brief-history-of-time-book-theoretical-physics-why-good-a8255251.html
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