I’ve been taking a little time lately to catch up on my reading, the most recent read to capture my attention is Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time‘.
I’ve managed to locate a pdf copy of Hawking’s work and thought I’d pass it along to those that may want to look over his simple approach to a damn difficult subject.
If you’re going to read it on line (choose not to download) then you can removed the left sidebar by pressing on the upper left icon on the frame of the pdf viewer (immediately below). Enjoy.
About twice a year I wander over to the Gutenberg site and download bunches of books. Some of the things I snatch I have no current interest in, rather I’m trying to determine if I could gain an interest in the subject. Normally my downloads are on philosophy, religion, math, science, gardening or photography. I’ll download 30 or so volumes of which I may eventually read one or two. The others are abandoned after a few pages.
There is one subject that I’ve struggled to understand across the years and even though I’ve downloaded several books related to subject I still cannot wrap my head around Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. A download from my last visit to the Gutenberg site has gone a long way in helping me both understand the Theory and to help me understand why I have such difficulty in understanding the Theory. (Does that make sense?)
Interestingly, even though the volume was written in 1921, the author used a ‘crowd sourcing’ technique to flesh out contributions from roughly 300 different authors. Anyway, here is a brief excerpt that expertly expresses the challenges with understanding the Theory:
The conceptual difficulties of the theory arise principally from attributing to space and time the properties of things. No portion of space can be compared with another, save by convention; it is things which we compare. No interval of time can be compared with another, save by convention. The first has gone when the second becomes “now”. It is events that we compare, through the intervention of things.
Our measurements are never of space or of time, but only of the things and the events that occupy space and time. And since the measurements which we deal with as though they were of space and of time lie at the foundation of all physical science, while at the same time themselves constituting, as we have seen, the only reality of which we are entitled to speak, it is in order to examine with the utmost care the assumptions underlying them. That there are such assumptions is clear—the very possibility of making measurements is itself an assumption, and every technique for carrying them out rests on an assumption.
Is there an infinite amount of time? Must matter exist for time to exist? Will the universe continue to replicate?
Here are some of Roger Penrose’s thoughts
An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. He says he has found six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’) which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon. Sir Roger believes that ‘dead’ black holes are from earlier universes or ‘aeons’ and are observable now.
The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.
“We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon. So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points.”
I saw the article below while passing through on Yahoo. We live in a huge place. It’s so large that a trillion planets could be made entirely of of one substance.
You know a lot of folk believe that the universe that we live in is not the only one. I wonder how many multiples of trillions of diamond planets exist when they are all added up?
If you turn on captions you can see what it is that is being made. Check out size of the wok and the wall of peppers and garlic at about the 14:40 mark.
