Can the universe be explained -- to me?

Some years ago, I bought the book by Steven (Stephen?) Hawking called something like "A Brief History of Time," and found it, after the first chapter or two, un-readable. I mean, I'm pretty smart, but what he was trying to explain to me was WAY beyond what I could understand. I heard later that this book was "the least-read best-seller" of all time. All of us pretty smart people wanted to hear such a truly smart guy explain our universe to us that we bought the book, but it turned out that either he couldn't find the words to do it or we couldn't muster the brain power to follow his explanations.

Is it possible that our universe -- how we started, where we are now, where we're headed -- can't be explained in terms that most of us fairly smart people can understand? Or is it just that no one, including Mr. Hawking, genius that he is, can clearly and simply express it?

I always remember Einstein -- our touch stone for intelligence -- saying that he wasn't good at math. Obviously, he was better than most of us at it, but I think what he meant was that his ideas about physics -- about time and space -- came to him not as mathematical equations but as what we might call "epiphanies" or sudden ideas. He left it to later scientists, better at math, to prove or disprove him. (For the record, they proved some, still doubt others.) Einstein wanted to discover an over-reaching theory that would explain everything about our universe, but he came up short, as he admitted. But does such a theory actually exist?

And if it did, could it be explained to me, fairly smart -- but in the liberal arts, not the sciences -- in words I would understand?

Which brings me to my most problematic problem: Can the universe only be explained using higher math?

Math is where most of us leave the scene. We all know about adding and subtracting numbers -- hey, we do it with our bank balances -- and we can handle some basic algebra (x equals y), but anything beyond that leaves us not just cold but frozen in place. Okay, multiplication and division, maybe even fractions, some basic geometry -- this side times that side shows how many square feet of carpet we need -- but soon math goes off into spheres of thinking that we can't follow, and that, of course, is where lots of science -- especially in physics and astronomy -- takes off . . . which leaves most of us in the dust.

Can the universe be explained to intelligent people who aren't good at math? Can it be explained at all? And is math a necessary prerequisite for understanding it,much less explaining it?

I think there are History and English and other majors who occasionally have an inkling about science -- something that comes to us while showering or waking up or stoned -- that might actually be right about the universe. But we have no way to share it with the scientific community, who are, of course, publishing papers by each other and for each other. And we don't possess the math skills to turn our notions into equations, so we couldn't publish them even if we had a way to do so.

Shouldn't we have a sort of community forum for anyone who has an idea about something scientific -- but not the background or the math ability -- to share it? There are many smart people in the world who very well may, like Einstein, who was working in a patent office at the time, from time to time come up with new and important ideas about scientific stuff they're not trained in. Or at least the germ of an idea that scientists could then take off from. Think about the early observers of the stars and the sun and the planets. Copernicus didn't need a degree in math to know that the sun didn't revolve around the planets. He looked up and figured it out.

The universe is obviously complicated, almost beyond our means of deciphering it. Almost but not quite. We can do it and will. As we'll decipher, eventually, cancer and love and all those other mysteries of life. But can we find the words to deliver our discoveries to the rest of us?

Ah, that would be true genius!