It’s impossible to cover everything in this article, so here’s an overview of some of the key theories and concepts that he explained in detail. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking basically walks us through the evolution of scientific theories over the centuries. This is the ultimate goal of science and our quest for knowledge.
We can explain and predict parts of it through separate theories, but we lack a unified theory that fully explains the whole universe. Today, we still have an incomplete understanding of our universe. Then in 1687, Newton’s theory on gravity explained why this happened-the celestial bodies were being attracted to one another by gravitational force. In the 1600s, our predictions finally aligned with our observations, when it was theorized that the moon, stars, and planets (including Earth) orbited around the sun in ellipses (elongated circles). Many different theories were debated thereafter. that Earth was round (not flat) and that the sun, moon, stars and planets moved around Earth in circular orbits. Over the centuries, mankind has vastly updated our knowledge by making observations, forming theories, then constantly testing, discarding or refining them based on how well our observations matched our predictions.įor instance, Aristotle first theorized in 340 B.C. While the universe may seem vast and unknowable, it actually follows certain laws that can be observed, understood and predicted.
We can have more confidence in a theory if it makes accurate predictions consistently, but we can never prove a theory definitively. All it takes is 1 false event to disprove a theory. To have a meaningful discussion of the universe, we must first understand what a scientific theory is.Ī good theory must (i) accurately describe events based on a model (with rare exceptions), and (ii) accurately predict future outcomes or observations. However, all theories are provisional, because something that has been true so far can still be contradicted in the future. In this free book summary of “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking, you’ll get a brief overview of mankind’s scientific discoveries so far.įor more details, examples and scientific background, do check out our full book summary bundle in pdf/mp3 infographic, text and audio formats! Overview: A Brief History of Time Using simple layman terms, this book explains abstract concepts about cosmology and physics-such as space, time, black holes, quantum theory-to help us understand our universe in scientific terms. When and how was our universe created? Where did we come from? Where are we going? These are some of the questions that mankind has been asking for centuries in our quest to understand the world.
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