In 1988 the well-known British scientist Professor Stephen Hawking wrote a book "A Brief History of Time, From the Big Bang to Black Holes" that became famous. It was written not for his peers, but for the general public. It is an excellent book and more than one million copies were sold all over the world. However, it is well known that very few people read it all, some say less than 10% of the would-be readers. And the number of people who understood fully what he said was much lower still. In 2005 he published a new version to include all the discoveries that were made in the meantime. Although he said that it would be simpler, and he named it "A Briefer History of Time" it is too early to say if his readers will agree.
Most people would like to know something about relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang, black holes, etc but very few do. These words are used all the time and everybody has heard the name of the man who is at the base of it all: Albert Einstein. And this is more or less all.
In addition people do not want to admit that they ignore what is really hidden between these words, these concepts. Few would admit that all you know about Einstein is his famous equation E=mc² and that he is the father of the atomic bomb. And that, in fact, is not true.
Many writers have tried to fill this lack of information, but scientists wrote most of them -for obvious reasons- and their language is not always as clear and simple as it should be to be generally understood.
This document has not the same pretension. It is not written by a scientist, even less by a theoretical physicist or astronomer. The author read -with difficulties- Professor Hawking's first book, and had to take some notes to "understand" some of the more difficult concepts. Being captivated, the author read more books and documents on the subject, and took more notes.
This document is a summary of these notes. It describes briefly what the
author understood about these new theories leaving apart most, if not all,
the mathematics involved.