On the Origin of Time: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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Not only does this theory unite the frontiers of quantum mechanics and cosmology, but, in a more philosophical sense, it is a profound statement on the importance of humankind. Hertog’s novel is an all-encompassing, if occasionally meandering, synthesis of Hawking’s final theory, the historical context of past discoveries, and the philosophy underlying these powerful ideas. In a pioneering work that is both grounded in science and deeply profound, Hertog carefully unfolds Hawking’s final perspective and grand design for the universe in a compelling blend of science and story. With bold chapter names like “Cosmogenesis,” “Lost in the Multiverse,” and “Time without Time,” one can expect their assumptions to be truly tested by the scope of this book. That is indeed the case: Hertog effectively guides the reader through mind-boggling possibilities that describe the origin and make-up of the universe, from nine-dimensional space in string theory to an infinitely diverging multiverse.

While the book endeavors to be accessible, it is still a tad dense. Concepts that Hertog thinks should be easily understood are oftentimes quite complicated, and certain ideas do not feel fully explained before Hertog leaps onto the next. At times, the cyclical, metaphysical reasoning becomes convoluted, which may leave the reader feeling overwhelmed. Ultimately, readers will still walk away with an understanding of modern cosmology and a new outlook on our role in the universe, if they can avoid getting lost in the technicalities. In particular, the patterns and magnitudes of the fluctuations that we've discovered in the modern radiation left over from that early, hot, dense state teach us a number of important properties about our Universe. They teach us how much matter was present in dark matter as well as normal matter: protons, neutrons and electrons. They give us a measurement of the Universe's spatial curvature, as well as the presence of dark energy and the effects of neutrinos.In this chapter, Hawking also covers how the topic of the origin of the Universe and time was studied and debated over the centuries: the perennial existence of the Universe hypothesised by Aristotle and other early philosophers was opposed by St. Augustine and other theologians' belief in its creation at a specific time in the past, where time is a concept that was born with the creation of the Universe. In the modern age, German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued again that time had no beginning. In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expanding Universe implied that between ten and twenty billion years ago, the entire Universe was contained in one singular extremely dense place. This discovery brought the concept of the beginning of the Universe within the province of science. Currently scientists use Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics to partially describe the workings of the Universe, while still looking for a complete Grand Unified Theory that would describe everything in the Universe. Cornelia Bargmann, David Botstein, Lewis C. Cantley, Hans Clevers, Titia de Lange, Napoleone Ferrara, Eric Lander, Charles Sawyers, Robert Weinberg, Shinya Yamanaka and Bert Vogelstein (2013)

The thesis of the cosmological theory Hawking developed with his PhD student is that the origin of time is the Big Bang and that the laws of physics do not precede the Big Bang, but were born with the Big Bang. The main hypothesis of their work is that physics laws evolve with time, at least during the very first moment of the Universe and are not transcendant and immutable at the scale of the birth of our Universe as supposed by the theories of Newton and Einstein. In this chapter, Hawking describes the development of scientific thought regarding the nature of space and time. He first describes the Aristotelian idea that the naturally preferred state of a body is to be at rest, and which can only be moved by force, implying that heavier objects will fall faster. However, Italian scientist Galileo Galilei experimentally proved Aristotle's theory wrong with by observing the motion of objects of different weights and concluding that all objects would fall at the same rate. This eventually led to English scientist Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravity. However, Newton's laws implied that there is no such thing as absolute state of rest or absolute space as believed by Aristotle: whether an object is 'at rest' or 'in motion' depends on the inertial frame of reference of the observer. An expanding Universe could have originated from a singular point— an event in spacetime— where all of space and time emerged from a singularity.

With the idea of a quantum beginning in mind, Hertog spends an entire chapter toying with the multiverse: If the laws of the universe are determined by chance, what’s not to say there exists a sea of universes all exhibiting different properties? His prose shines here through vivid and imaginative visual imagery — he describes a bubbling sea of island universes, a gently curving spacetime that smooths out into a rounded bowl at the beginning of all things, and the “ the slow fading of the suns” that one sees by gazing into the embers of our origins — according to the astronomer Georges Lemaître whom Hertog repeatedly quotes. The book describes Hawking and Hertog's top-down approach to Cosmology, utilized to justify what would otherwise be predictive errors in the Hartle-Hawking state (No-boundary Creation) Theory, without the use of the Anthropic Principle or Multiverses. This approach is justified through explorations into quantum superposition and the idea that the past can exist as superpositions until observed in a similiar way to the future and present. According to Hertog, Hawking did not wish to make philosophy, but made philosophy when making quantum cosmology. Hawking wished to unravel the mysteries of physics and Universe and despite his physical condition was able to communicate his optimistic enthusiasm to his research group in Cambridge. The current quantum theory of the Big Bang presently dismisses the theory of multiverse, at least until it is disproved by new telescope observations or other mathematical theories.

Like many great discoveries in science, this leads to a slew of delightful new questions, including:

Saul Perlmutter and members of the Supernova Cosmology Project; Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess and members of the High-Z Supernova Team (2015) The different ways dark energy could evolve into the future. Remaining constant or increasing in ... [+] strength (into a Big Rip) could potentially rejuvenate the Universe, while reversing sign could lead to a Big Crunch. Under either of those two scenarios, time may be cyclical, while if neither comes true, time could either be finite or infinite in duration to the past. NASA/CXC/M.Weiss For a time, there were multiple competing ideas which were all consistent with the observations we had. In the first chapter, Hawking discusses the history of astronomical studies, particularly ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's conclusions about spherical Earth and a circular geocentric model of the Universe, later elaborated upon by the second-century Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Hawking then depicts the rejection of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic model and the gradual development of the currently accepted heliocentric model of the Solar System in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, first proposed by the Polish priest Nicholas Copernicus in 1514, validated a century later by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei and German scientist Johannes Kepler (who proposed an elliptical orbit model instead of a circular one), and further supported mathematically by English scientist Isaac Newton in his 1687 book on gravity, Principia Mathematica.