Stephen Hawking Special

Finished two Hawking-related books. I said finished, not understood. A lot of the stuff just went flying over my head.

First is Kitty Ferguson's Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything. It's not really a biography - more like an introduction to the man, his family life, how it all started, past discoveries and recent research. People who haven't read A Brief History of Time or had a hard time understanding it should probably start with this book. Kitty devotes most of the pages explaining in plain English Hawking's theories and how he arrived at them.

I would be surprised if Kitty really understood everything written in the book. I mean, I understand fermions and boson, strong and weak forces, the uncertainty principle, general relativity, quantum mechanics, singularities, black holes, event horizon, entropy, etc. But when the discussion starts going into arbitrary elements, the cosmological constant, wormholes, superstrings, four-dimension space-time, my mind just can't take it anymore.

I'm surprised to find out at the end of the book that Stephen later separated with his wife of 20+ years. Jane has always been a devout Christian, and Stephen, well, let's just say he believes the moment of Creation started with a singularity. Then, there were grumblings that Stephen has been putting more priority on international tours, media outings, and his research than his family, which ultimately resulted in the breakup. Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

I also finished The Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking's sequel to A Brief History of Time. Did you know that:

• Time is pear-shaped? Einstein's theory of relativity shows that time and space are inextricably interconnected. One cannot curve space without curving time as well. And this time is bent back by matter in the early universe. The whole universe we observe is contained in a region whose boundary shrinks to zero at the big bang, which gives time its pear shape.
• The universe has multiple histories? I myself didn't know this. I just know that it has something to do with uncertainty principle, anthropic principle, and the universe being inflationary. Next.
• We can actually predict the future, as postulated by Newtonian determinism. Even with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, we still have to wave function to tell us how probable it is for something to happen. However, if information is being lost in black holes, then that would reduce our ability to predict the future. Question is, does part of the wave function get lost in black holes, does all of information get out again, as the p-brane model suggests?
• Time travel might just be possible. It has something to do with wormholes, cosmic strings, time travel horizon, time loops, negative energy flowing back into black holes, etc. Hawking didn't give a blueprint for a time machine.

Hawking also talked about the inevitability of DNA tweaking and growing embryos externally to speed up evolution. Pretty cool stuff, even if I didn't understand half of it.