Astrophysical Masers and their Environments (IAU Symposium 242) Book

An exceptionally good, concise look at physics for the layman. The explanations were just super. Simple, yet not stupidly so for me with my high school & Sunday supplement level of education on the subject. There are some tough concepts to understand. For instance, wave-particle duality is pretty weird, so be prepared to stop the book & think about what he says at times. Maybe even repeat his explanation. I found most became fairly clear, even time travel, but maybe not string theory. That still seems a bit far out to me. (I've read that it might not be the correct path after all & now they're just ditching time completely since it might not exist at some levels.) And, I'm still not sold on such huge quantities of dark matter.

He did a great job debunking determinism & many of the older theories of the universe, but gently. He showed how they were stepping stones towards refining what we know today & things that we're still struggling to understand. He points out how the educational & social systems suffer from a lot of lag which I struggled with in school due to the contradictions with newer theories. My teachers made little sense in distinguishing between them & they never showed the growth nearly as well. He really is a genius to be able to dumb down such a complex subject so well. He looks forward to the day when we all understand the refinements of Einstein's equations & their consequences well enough that they're second nature. If everyone were to read & understand this book, we would.

Best of all, he makes it clear that many of the theories I was taught might be wrong in extremes, but are perfectly acceptable in my observable, living universe, so I don't feel like a complete idiot. Time varies with the observer, but the fractions of a second difference that my GPS uses are of intellectual interest only. I know the the rough basics of how the gadget works, so it isn't magic & that's all that really matters. Whew!

I was a bit surprised at his references to god since I thought he was an atheist. Apparently this was his way to explain in terms that he thought most people would understand. I found this on the web: Hawking now explained: "What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn't. I'm an atheist." He added: "Religion believes in miracles, but these aren't compatible with science." That makes more sense.

After listening to this, I'm glad I read it rather than A Brief History of Time. I don't need any more detail & doubt I could integrate an equation any more since I've had no need of anything beyond logic, simple algebra, & Euclidean geometry since I got out of school. (I haven't even bothered with trig since I find geometric constructions quicker & more accurate for woodworking.) Use it or lose it. I lost it & don't really miss it, but it also means I'm not going to be one of those ferreting out the secrets of the universe we are still struggling with. They're interesting, but of no practical value to me and, as he points out, science has progressed so much that no one can understand it all any more. So, this was a nice glance at a very interesting, if odd area.