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CONFESSION: This book sat on my shelves for over twelve years before I was brave enough to open it and try to read it. I survived physics in high school thanks to the amazing teacher Mrs. Abernathy. I discovered a “physics for English majors” (no math!) to complete the last science requirements for college. While I enjoy The Big Bang Theory, I wasn’t sure I could keep up with Stephen Hawking. I bought the book as a souvenir from a class trip to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and it has taunted me ever since.

To my surprise and delight, Hawking not only understands theoretical physics more than I ever will, but he is able to explain it to English majors like me. Since my background knowledge of advanced physics is lacking, I’m sure I did not comprehend everything, but I was able to follow the general concepts–and are they fascinating.

I knew that our understanding of the universe had grown tremendously since my last science classes. Now Hawking has put those discoveries in order and given them context. From the discoveries of the earliest astronomers and scientists such as Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton to the advances of later scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer to his own work today, Hawking shows how science both builds on the work of those who came before and changes what we thought we knew.

He is able to choose just the right analogy to explain concepts that stretch my understanding of time and space in spaces smaller than an atom and further than we can see. I suspect that I will now be more interested in the latest discoveries from physics and look forward to the day when the broad principles of physics will be commonly understood by nearly everyone, not just a few scientists who specialize in the field.

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