Reading Report on  A Brief History of Time
外国语学院2011级硕士研究生 黄丹丹

  I remember clearly that when I was in high school I was interested in the outer space. Every time, when I raised my head to look at the shining stars in the night sky, it's hard for me to imagine what does the outer space look like. Does it have so much beautiful stars or planets? Why do we live in the earth but not the other planets in outer space? What does the other planets look like? Does ET and UFO exist in real? At that age, many ridiculous questions came to my mind.
  One day, I went shopping with my little brother. My eyes glanced at one book quickly and insistently. That book was named A Brief History of Time, which was wrote by Stephen Hawking. I was curious about it and couldn't help reading it. After reading, what I knew was that Hawking is really a great genuine. Also, I knew he would come to China-zhejiang university to address a lecture about that book. I was eager to communicate with him face to face, but at that time, I was just a child studying in high school.
  Today, I am a postgraduate in SCUT, major in English. I want read that book again in an English version. While reading, thinking about what I had thought in the past to find out the differences. Anyway, in this summer halliday, it is a new start to read that book and I can communicate with Hawking's mind or thoughts directly. Without doubt, I do learn a lot from its original version.
  At least, no so many ridiculous questions came to my mind but more sense and meaningful questions. Was there a beginning of time? Could time run backwards? Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries?  I can figure out the truth from A Brief History of Time.
  First, let me do some introduction about that book. A Brief History of Time is a great book by Professor Stephen Hawking, the world's most famous physicist, black hole theory and the "Big Bang" theory’s creator. It is a good book of modern theoretical physics. You can get an outline of our knowledge currently about gravitation, time, big bang and so on.
  I still cannot believe this is written by the most gifted scientist for general public. Using simple language, Stephen illustrated a full picture of what the universe is and what time is, within the bundary of human beings current understanding. Never imagine pure theratic physics could be so interesting and easy to understand, although I have to admit that I only understand little of what he is saying. Because what I really interested is the time machine or whether we really can go back to any dynasty by time channel.
  After reading the book, I felt strongly pessimistic with the further advancement of theoretical physics. After all, theory gets away from practice. It is, in my opinion, quite a dead-end job. Any newly proposed physical theory need to be in good accordance with experimental observation to be proved and publicly accepted. Theoretical physics focuses on the extremes --the lightest particle, the earliest stage of the universe, etc. According to Hawking, we human being were not able to produce the required extreme conditions to test the new theories. Therefore we were not able to prove the authenticity of them, thus not able to advance. Prof. Hawking wrote the book in 1988. Twenty-two years later, we regrettably find that the improvement in experimental methods and equipments in the area of particle and cosmos- physics is trivial compared to what is really needed.
  But you should not go for understanding everything inside the book because the physics require proper math formulae for complete understanding. I can't understand "uncertainty principle". I think particles' position and velocity are fixed in a way that we are not recognized now.  However, I agree with the following opinions:
1) There is no single formulation of the fundamental theory.
2) The whole collection of different formulations could be regarded as a complete unified theory.
  As an unfortunately result of the theories not being able to be proved, or falsified, a whole lot of different theories, all interwoven with indecipherable mathematics burgeon. To catch up with the "state-of-the-art", a new theoretical physicist has to study the majority of these theories, and the very bespoke mathematics attached to each of them. In my opinion, the process would be very exhausting, and unworthy, since most of the theories will be proven completely nonsense. I believe the difficulty and boringness will not stop a small group of very ambitious people from pursuing, in the hope their home-made theory would someday equate the status of that of Newton's and Einstein's today. I personally would be willing to see my child become one of them.