3. a brief history of time

i have just finished reading stephen hawking's infamous and ambitious bestseller a brief history of time, in which he talks about the universe sans the equations that would have made it unbearable.

do you know how a black hole is formed? bear with me as i try to explain it in words that are more wonder-ridden than articulate:

when a sufficient amount of mass has formed in space, its inherent gravity begins to make its ever-moving particles contract. the resulting collisions give way to heat, which makes the basic hydrogen atoms burn into helium, producing a star whose fuel burns off for an average of a million years. while the star lives, this burning balances the constant pull of gravity that would inexorably bring the star closer to its center. after the star has burned itself out, the contractions begin anew until the star collapses in on itself. stars with masses big enough than a certain calculated limit become black holes, while the small ones either become white dwarfs or neutron stars.

a black hole is such that its gravity is so strong that it bends the space-time continuum, making it curve inward and trapping in any light that seeks to escape. literally, according to hawking, an astronaut who meets his fate stupidly falling into a black hole has come to the end of time.

(and here i was dreaming to be an astronaut first and foremost as a kid!)

i am sure that what i have just typed from memory has more than a few gazillion errors to it, but still i cannot help feeling a certain amount of pride at the fact that i was able to explain (more to myself than to anyone, really) how a black hole forms the way i have seen it in my mind's eye as i tried to follow hawking's narrative.

relativity! e=mc (squared)! quantum mechanics! a complete unified theory of physics!

even in deliberate layman's language, i could barely grasp the technicalities that hawking covered. all throughout he hinted at convoluted mathematics that i was just too thankful to have been spared. all throughout were passages that said that if this certain condition had not been met, if this certain event had not happened, and if this had only been slightly been off-place at this certain point in time, then intelligent (?) beings like us would not have had the chance to wonder about the meaning of the universe at all. we would simply not have existed.

the most curious thing about all this though, is that hawking, a celebrated genius with an iq of 160, ascribes everything he has learned or was given to discern, to chance.