The Illustrated Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded Edition, by Stephen William Hawking is a redux of a classic book. It's a great introduction to ideas in physics and is a fun read that can summarize what is going on in our world.#

When Hawking is talking about the beginning of time, there's this great quote...#

[Immanuel Kant's arguments for believing the universe had a beginning] are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever. As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: "What did God do before he created the universe?" Augustine didn't reply: "He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions." Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. [pg. 13]

Stephen writes about the funny nature of physicists...#

The final result was a joint paper by Penrose and myself in 1970, which at last proved that there must have been a big bang singularity provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe. There was a lot of opposition to our work, partly from the Russians because of their Marxist belief in scientific determinism, and partly from people who felt that the whole idea of singularities was repugnant and spoiled the beauty of Einstein's theory. However, one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem. So in the end our work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a big bang singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularities at the beginning of the universe. [pgs. 66-67]

Another great quote...#

As Guth has remarked, "It is said that there's no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch." [pg. 167]

Stephen has an opinion on alien encounters...#

I think that any visit by aliens or people from the future would be much more obvious and, probably, much more unpleasant. If they are going to reveal themselves at all, why do so only to those who are not regarded as reliable witnesses? If they are trying to warn us of some great danger, they are not being very effective. [pg. 206]

If people from the future can't change the past significantly when they visit, perhaps they need to target people who have delusions or strange dreams and then make them real. The past would not be nominally different? Eh, that isn't very clear, never mind :)

In a small biography of Albert Einstein in the back of the book is this great note about all the people who disliked Einstein...#

When a book was published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, he retorted, "If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!" [pg. 235]