On this date in 1988, the first edition of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was published.
Thank you, Dr. Hawking. I have read it three times. I confess that some of it is still somewhat unclear to me. (Who the Hell am I kidding? I mean most of it.) But at least my cosmic ignorance of the universe can now be expressed more elegantly and in much larger words.
In the introduction to a later edition, Hawking reports with a certain measure of pride that he has sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex. It occurs to me that I have read none of hers. And it further occurs that sex as she seems to understand it might cause me as many puzzled frowns as does the cosmological wormhole.
