A year ago, we remember reading legendary British physicist Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time while waiting for the 200-year-old musical clock at Salar Jung museum to strike 12. Back then, we thought that maybe the universe conspired for this to happen (we didn't know what we were in for when we entered the museum).

Hawking's debut was aimed at drawing the attention of the non-scientist — and he even joked about it in the acknowledgements. Someone had once told him that his book sales would be halved with each equation he planned on including. So, there were none except Einstein's E = mc². "I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers," Hawking quipped. It turned out to be a bestseller and won us over. For, here we are again, reading his last work.