No, not the movie.
The journey through a Stephen Hawkings book is an interesting one for me — albeit, it has always ended up with me being sad.
I happened to finish his book, Theory of Everything, in a relatively short time (2 days). Now, this is a considerable achievement for me, in comparison to the time it took me to complete his other book, A Brief History of Time, which I read many years ago while still in college.
But the sensations were the same.
For me, Hawkings’s books start with the grand simplicity of the universe. Perhaps that’s because he deals with classical, deterministic concepts in most of these opening chapters.
Most books of this nature get tougher to understand in a linear fashion. (Of course this is subjective and mostly a personal experience but this being a personal blog, what more can one expect).
Hawkings’s book appears simple enough to comprehend. At first. And may be till about 50-65% of the book. Then, quantum happens.
After this point, I haven’t been able to conveniently grasp his thoughts or his expressions. This specific experience is what made it tough to get through the final portions of A Brief History of Time. Took me several weeks to build the will to read the words even if I couldn’t visualize the meaning.
I had the same experience with Theory of Everything too. It was okay till the part where he describes universe and the big bang as a warped surface of Earth going from pole to equator to pole and then back… but when the entropy discussions came in, I was lost. Unbelievably lost.
As an inherently visual person, I can’t process much of abstractions. This deficit has failed me in math, specifically math that aids physics, more specifically math that was invented to deal with physics. But that was not so much of a shock as the inability to process these words in these books on Physics and Universe.
Theory of Everything is still a great read. It’s 7 lectures in all. I suspect that the part about entropy is where it gets really interesting. I was thinking of what life would be like if the law of entropy did not apply at some point in our own spacetime without breaking the laws of gravity.