On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory
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Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. In order to solve this mystery, Hawking studied the big bang origin of the universe, but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse—countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to harbor life.
Holed up in the theoretical physics department at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking and his friend and collaborator Thomas Hertog worked on this problem for twenty years, developing a new theory of the cosmos that could account for the emergence of life. Peering into the extreme quantum physics of cosmic holograms and venturing far back in time to our deepest roots, they were startled to find a deeper level of evolution in which the physical laws themselves transform and simplify until particles, forces, and even time itself fades away. This discovery led them to a revolutionary idea: The laws of physics are not set in stone but are born and co-evolve as the universe they govern takes shape. As Hawking’s final days drew near, the two collaborators published their theory, which proposed a radical new Darwinian perspective on the origins of our universe.
On the Origin of Time offers a striking new vision of the universe’s birth that will profoundly transform the way we think about our place in the order of the cosmos and may ultimately prove to be Hawking’s greatest legacy.
Reviews with the most likes.
A lot of information needs to be processed by my brain while reading this book. First, I am no physicist, but I love being updated on significant discoveries. This book keeps me busy for more than 1 month. I am trying to not rush the reading process as I want to digest all the concepts as much as possible. (I am pretty sure I still miss a lot though).
This book will bring you to the journey to, as the title is, the origin of time. Starting from the Big Bang, the evolution of physical laws, anthropic principles in the multiverse and how Stephen is against that principle (I am on Stephen's side before I read the book, and I am happy to discover that Stephen also shares the same view).
The goal of this book is to inform the reader of his new framework of physics, which bound dynamics, boundary conditions, and observership together into one. In this view, instead of searching for a final theory that describes the law of physics from a bottom-up approach (that is predicting the law of physics in the current time, through the evolutionary process from the beginning of time), he proposes that we should look them from a top-down view (that is tracing the law of physics back in time by our observation). The most remarkable new mindset that he proposes is, inspired by Everett's many world interpretations, our history is somewhat a superposition of multiple histories. We “create” our history by observation.
By this chapter, my brain is already smoking. But then, he continues to explore the concept of the holography principle (especially a duality between quantum mechanics and gravity), to understand the beginning of time itself. That is super interesting, but my mind is already melting. I need to stop reading every 5 or 10 pages, just to digest what is all about.
Anyway, it was an enjoyable journey. Thanks to the author who patiently wrote something that is extremely complicated and high-level concept of physics to be readable by non-physicists like me. Would love to hear more about Stephen's new top-down approach more in the future.
