Someone had gifted me this book as a kid, I do not remember who or when, I think it was my maths teacher.

I remember Hawking says in his book, that adding equations to books decreases their popularity. I remember not particularly liking this.

But I also remember reading, for the first time in my life, about light cones, about causality, about the big bang, black holes and their event horizons, entropy and the arrow of time, about Hubble’s discovery, the multitude of galaxies and the ever expanding universe, about the electrons with their dual natures and their half spins, bosons and fermions, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Pauli’s exclusion principle, about supernovas and the creation of heavy elements, the spinning neutron stars, the Chandrasekhar limit, the spontaneous creation and annihilation of particles, the Hawking radiation, about quarks and their funny color names, about gluons, about the strong and weak nuclear forces, radioactivity, mesons, and muons, and pions, about quasars and gamma rays, about relativity and the space-time, the precession of mercury, the ultraviolet catastrophe, Einstein’s genius, about his folly, about mass and energy, the Planck’s constant, about gravitational lensing, about strings, about mirrors, about the vastness of the universe, and our place in it.

Perhaps everything I’ve learnt since has been an attempt to understand this brief glimpse at the history of time itself.

R.I.P.