Time

First published in Column 8, on the 1^st July, 1992

Before I do Time (metaphorically speaking), I want to thank the person who sent me some recycling labels to use on my countless Inland Revenue envelopes. That was generous and inventive. And yes, I did receive more IRD material during the week, including a reply to a letter we wrote them in mid-May. Their reply merely said they would be replying to our letter as soon as possible…

Isn’t it odd that after you come across a word or a name that was previously unfamiliar, said word or name suddenly crops up all over. I bought two books in the Regent book sale, one on chess problems and one of crosswords. (The crossword craze is over in our house, by the way; we’re now talking to the kids again.)

A quick glance at the chess problem book turned up the name of a problem-maker, Samuel Loyd (yes, that is the correct spelling), of whom I’d never heard. And in the book on crosswords, who should appear as a puzzle-maker? Sam Loyd.

All this to introduce another doubling-up. I came across two very different articles on Stephen Hawking last week, one in Time magazine, and the other in a Wellington newspaper, which had reprinted an article from The Times. At first I thought they meant The Times of London, but a more careful reading of the material made me suspicious. Perhaps it’s the Taiwan Times.

The anonymous author of this article made the bold statement that Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time (no, not of Time magazine, Stanton), had sold so many copies that every 1000^th person on the planet owns one.

Now, even a cursory bit of calculation makes than an awful lot of copies. Someone better informed can tell me whether we count the five billion people on this planet in US billions or UK. Anyway, according to Anon, there is a minimum of five million copies of the book in existence. Worse, there may be 5000 million. A Brief History of Time must therefore be well read by the Chinese. And I thought it was difficult enough in English.

After I’d read this article, and this wasn’t the only piece of folderol it came out with, I found what appeared to be a somewhat trued figure in Time magazine. They quoted 1.7 million copies, which sounds slightly more reliable, though it makes Mr Hawking anything but a pauper. No doubt his publishes hope his next book comes out quickly.

I mentioned some other folderol Anon had written. He/she says, for example: ‘Today we no longer look to religious leaders to say anything important about the world, yet the hunger for meaning hasn’t diminished.’ The inference was that we look instead to scientists.

Certainly when we have theologians of the ilk of Barbara Thiering we have cause to baulk at following their lead, but can we really class scientists as the new Truth Messiahs?

How often have you read with amazing the latest pronouncements by scientists? (Or at least by those who publicise them.) Sleeping on your right side drains the brain’s left hemisphere; cabbage causes cancer of the cartilage; excessive cuddling produces corns.

Mr Hawking himself has been the victim on at least two occasions of his own rashness, though in things much less corny than corns.

In 1985 he proclaimed that if the Universe stopped expanding and began to contract, time would start running backwards. Somehow everything that had ever happened would be played in reverse.

The implications of reversal are many and varied and I’m running out of space. Consequently I’ll depart from usual format and explore these implications in some depth next week.

Sequel here

The edition I remember having... 

Since this column was written back in 1992, the figures quoted are out of date. An article on Wikipedia claims there have been 25 million copies sold in 40 languages; this information was drawn from an article in Cosmos, written by Robin McKie and published in 2007. AI on Google initially disagreed, but on a second try it also came up with the 25 million figure but with 60 languages. I think it was quoting from the Wikipedia article…

So that leaves my estimate of how many copies were sold as being well short of the mark. But we are talking of an article from  fifteen years later.