Essay on A Brief History of Time Summary

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Pages: 6

Theoretical Physics, a modern topic of science with an extremely deterring sound and famous for being beyond complex, is a subject which cannot be explained with ease. Stephen Hawking, the most famous living scientist today, wrote A Brief History of Time in 1988, updated in 1996, in order to take upon this daunting task of explaining basic theoretical physics to a population who had previously barely studied any science. Within A Brief History of Time, Hawking touches upon seven topics in-depth while easily explaining them in a simple manner: our picture of the universe, space and time, the expanding universe, the uncertainty principle, elementary particles and the forces of nature, black holes, and the origin and fate of the universe. …show more content…
This is due to the fact that if one calculates the speed of the particle, the particle’s position would have changed too much to be determined. If the position of the particle is found, the speed would be changed too much to be found. This change is due to the techniques used to measure them. When using a low frequency light, the speed is more accurately found, but the position is moved. When using a high frequency light, the position is found more accurately, but the greater energy disrupts the speed. Hawking within Chapter five, addresses the building blocks of the universe: quarks and other elementary particles. Quarks are the basis of all matter, making up protons and neutrons. These subatomic particles come in six “flavors”: up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. Each one of these flavors also has three “colors”, red green and blue (these colors though are not actually visible pigment, for the quark are smaller than the wavelength of visible light). Also in existence, are anti-quarks which exist in 18 types as well. Every particle though has a spin. A spin is what a particle looks like from different directions. There are two different types of spin a particle can have: 0, 1, or 2, or ½. Chapter 6 focuses on one the greater topics of the book, black holes. A black whole is a point in space where a star has collapsed into an infinite density at one