A Brief History of Time

For those who may remember I am really into space exploration. I’m all about manned exploration of other planets in our solar system. Earth may be our home and where we were created, but there’s too much space for us to waste out there. I do believe for that humanity to survive the long haul we need to expand, explore and stay excited about our future.

Hand-in-hand with my love of space exploration (and my secret hankering to go into the unknown) I really dig physics. When I was in high school I wrote many papers on the origin or the universe, the birth and death of stars and the end-of-times. Not only do I like to read about it I’m a huge fan of post-apocalyptic movies and books. Morbid as that may be.

Last weekend I picked up The Illustrated A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking. I’d seen the book on the shelf for years and I kept putting it off and putting it off, having better things to do and other things to focus on. I spent my Saturday evening reading the first few chapters, that’s just how exciting my life is. =)

If you crave to understand some of the complex mysteries of the universe this is an excellent book. Hawking writes in such vivid prose with a good dash of humor and plenty of analogous examples it’s hard not to keep reading (at least to me). I think I’ll end up trying to sleep tonight counting quarks, mesons, K-mesons and gluons in my brain. Hawking has a great knack for explaining things in a way that a non-scientist like me can understand the complex relationships that exist in physics. It’s no wonder he’s considered one of the smartest men to have lived.