Sloan: 'Brief History' can't be summarized

My book-of-the-month summary for June is “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking.

Impossible to summarize in 300-plus words, here are selected passages:

Wendel Sloan

• “We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.” — (from Carl Sagan’s introduction)

• Because of less gravitational pull, a twin traveling through space ages slower than his Earth twin.

• The first one to two billion years of Earth’s “existence were too hot for the development of anything complicated.”

• Although gravity is the weakest of the four forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear), its omnipresence shapes the large-scale structure of the universe.

• Nuclear fusion reaction, as in the sun, converts hydrogen into helium. Further heating converts helium into heavier elements, including carbon and oxygen — essential for life.

• “An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job.”

• “Most people believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene to break these laws.”

• Early attempts to describe the universe involved events and natural phenomena being controlled by spirits with human emotions. They had to be placated and their favors sought.

• Gradually, humans realized that the universe observed certain regularities, such as the sun rising in the east, whether or not sacrifices were made. “The sun and the moon might still be gods, but they obeyed strict laws.”

• In the 19th century, “God was confined to the areas that science did not understand.”

• “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?”

• Understanding why we and the universe exist “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”

Contact Wendel Sloan at [email protected]