Physics for Dummies
Generally speaking, books about physics, the scientific explanation for the beginning of the universe, and advanced astronomy have been the realm of readers with advanced experience or education within the subject matter itself. Hawking's main theme in this book is that physics is for everybody; it is all in the delivery. Instead of using complex terms, he breaks down all of the subjects and the stages of our understanding of the beginning of time into bite-sized chunks, with verbiage that anyone is easily able to comprehend. This is the main theme of his work - that we can all understand science, and that we should indeed all try.
The Link Between Philosophy and Science
This is somewhat of a paradox in Hawking's narrative. It is usual for philosophy and science to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, because they are literally poles apart; philosophy deals with theories, unprovable beliefs, and logical conclusion making. It believes in almost everything because nothing can be disproved. Science, of course, says the opposite. Theories are tested, proved or unproved, and only what can be seen, experienced and verified is actually taken to be a fact. Philosophy believes in almost everything, science in almost nothing.
Yet according to Hawking, the forerunners of today's astrophysicists were men like Aristotle, whom we know as a philosopher. Because so much of the world, and the universe beyond it, was unknown in his time, trying to learn about it was not so much a scientific exercise as a philosophical one, a journey into what logically must be the case rather than what can be proven to be so.
There is a clear line in the book from philosophy to astronomy to physics, the only difference in the disciplines ultimately being the experience in each discipline of the men expounding on it, and the tools that they had to hand in order to try to prove what they were saying.
