Friday 7 October 2016

The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinaw

Sometimes I go online and feel like genius among idiots. Log into Facebook and you're surrounded by people trying to explain away the latest idiotic ranting by Donald Trump, or parroting a hip meme in the liberal community. Everyone, it seems, is stupid. 

A good way to feel like a complete idiot is to pick up a book like The Grand Design. From start to finish I struggled badly to comprehend much of what was said. Physic has never been my greatest strength - in fact, I didn't even take it in high school and have always struggled with its basic concepts. 

Yet I find science of all sorts utterly fascinating, and so I was eager to read what was touted as a book that was accessible to the lay person. There are no mathematical formulas; just basic descriptions and analogies to make these concepts easier to digest. It is a book that sets out to explain the whole universe, and that's precisely where it lost me. I guess my puny brain cannot comprehend that much information. 

In the beginning, Hawking sounds like a stoned college student. Take for example, the analogy of a goldfish in a bowl, looking out at the world. To him, the world looks very different to what it actually is, yet he can create certain rules from observations that can allow him to "see" the world. Then Hawking speculates that we are that goldfish... 

Although Hawking's analogies allow even people like me to follow along, I found myself lost more often than not. Often, the only thing I could follow were the constant stream of awful dad jokes scattered through the book. It seems as though every complex explanation is punctuated with some lame punchline.  

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