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\name{Holden} \last{Rohrer}
\prof{Jones}
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\noindent{\bf Part 1: Book Overview}

I read Stephen Hawking's ``A Brief History of Time,'' which used a much less narrative structure than a traditional memoir does.
It describes modern physics historically---how different theories developed over time, and I think that's why it's so effective.
Personal anecdotes like Hawking's co-development of the ``no-boundary proposal,'' where the universe is treated as flat (changing the definition of time so that it becomes indistinguishable with the spatial dimensions) or Newton's bitter feuds with other scientists are much more comprehensible than a purely mathematical construction of modern models.

It centers around the two major modern theories of physics, quantum mechanics (the theory that describes very small things) and general relativity (the theory that describes very heavy things).
Each chapter is organized chronologically and centers on a certain realization or broad change in consensus, so they mostly start with a discussion of ``classical'' physics, theories that made intuitive sense on a human scale like the laws of motion or the geocentric (universe centered on Earth) model.

As such, each is effectively a story.

\noindent{\bf Part 2: My Passion}

My passion is problem-solving.
At the beginning of this project, I thought that it was some specific field or study like computer science or mathematics or engineering, but my favorite bits of those fields are centred around solving problems.
In computer science or software engineering, there's a subcategory of embedded systems---small, highly constrained computers like the one that runs a thermostat or records data from a microphone into a wire.
I've set up and used a few of these for different tasks.
One such use case is running a small speaker or, as I attempted to do in a project for the engineering class, running headphones from an aux cable and providing a button-based interface to a small song library stored on an SD card.
My group was unsuccessful for a number of reasons, but we managed

\noindent{\bf Part 3: Connection}
The story which stood out to me the most was Hawking's development of Hawking Radiation, where black holes release energy like a star, albeit at much lower temperatures.


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