Nice editorial in TOI

We often read books inspite of not understanding them. Reasons for doing so are varied. Todays TOI editorial carried an article on this. The reason: A briefer history of time by Stephen Hawking. Read on...


Stephen Hawking — claimed by some to be capable of understanding the mind of God — has published A Briefer History of Time, a shorter, simpler version of his landmark A Brief History of Time, which appeared in 1988 and is, in effect, a biography of the cosmos.

Reading about the new book, I rummaged through my book shelves to find A Brief History of Time, which I bought 10 years ago and started reading four times, and stopped reading four times when the physics and the mathematics got too complicated.

Anyway, I'm making a fifth attempt to read the book, and this time I've promised myself to read on till the end. If the man can take the trouble to write a book to explain the universe — and has now done a made-easy edition, for dullards like me — the least I can do is take the trouble to read it, even if it involves giving myself a headache.

It seems I'm not the only one who feels so duty-bound. Despite the fact that many scholars have confessed that they could not follow all its arguments, A Brief History of Time became an instant mega-seller.

What explains its huge success? Why do people buy books, or listen to lectures, on cosmic subjects which they are incapable of understanding? Is it intellectual snobbery or intellectual masochism?

Is it just fetishism, as if mere ownership of a book, without our reading it, enables us to somehow 'possess' its subject-matter? The subject-matter of A Brief History is infinity, the endless continuum of the very great and the very small. As Hawking says, the size of the observable universe alone (never mind the infinitely unobservable) is a million million million million (1 with 24 zeroes) miles, a macrocosmic infinity not reflected in but simultaneously one and the same (for how can there be two infinities?) as the microcosmic infinity of molecules. Giant stars and subatomic particles so small that they cannot be measured are one; Creator and created, one. That infinite oneness is the open secret of Hawking's popularity, the universal appeal of his meta-physics, his meta-mathics. And that's why I'm having another bash at reading him. For can his infinite understanding of the infinite mind of God (another word for the workings of the cosmos) be an infinity any other than the infinitude of my ignorance?

Source:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1246905.cms