So has anyone here read this shit? Most of it I'm OK with

>>8579460
>reading popsci

Stop.

>>8579460
Considering this is a popsci book aimed at the layman? Yes, yes you are; I own a copy of this as a coffee table book for normies when they come to visit.

>>8579474
>for normies when they come to visit.

Have they though?

>>8579478
Sometimes, I try to avoid it really as I have mysophobia and have to sterilise my house again after they've been.

>>8579460
I hate books like that. Your example of imaginary time: Yes, it's a thing that you can think about time as a dimension as complex relative to the spatial coordinates. It turns up in a lot of weird contexts, i.e. Feynman's path integral is basically statistical mechanics in complex time, or Schrödinger's equation is basically a diffusion equation in complex time. As interesting as this is (and it really is, it's a nice thing to think about), I can't imagine anyone being fascinated by it just reading about it in some book, standing on its own. Another thing is: Time is not fucking imaginary. The term "imaginary" is mathematical, it makes no sense to say "time is imaginary". What is really happening is that the relation between temporal and spatial dimensions resembles the structure of complex numbers. I haven't read the book, but I bet that it's still written in a sensationalist manner so that all people take away is "time is imaginary", which is a terrible thing to take away.

>>8579460
>but then when he starts going on about "Imaginary time" and all that jazz I lost it. I don't get it.

It's nothing more than a tool to make problems easier to solve. A wick rotation (what he's talking about, and it's what you should google) transforms the hyperbolic geometry of flat spacetime into a Euclidean geometry that yields a simplified version of the problem at hand.

You're not stupid, hawking just failed to actually teach any of the complicated models involved in Modern physics. I recommend Sean Carroll's books.

>>8579497
>A wick rotation
>Sean Carroll's books


I'll look into it. Cheers.

>>8579497
While I agree that you need more fundament to see it, the book is still about the beauty of the concepts and ideas rather than the profane technicalities. Wick rotation is just an exploit of the geometry of space time, a trick to make things easier to calculate. The interesting part is why it works and what that tells us about space time.