2023 book by Thomas Hertog
On the Origin of Time is a 2023 book by physicist Thomas Hertog about the theories of Stephen Hawking.[1] Thomas Hertog is a Belgian cosmologist working at KU Leuven university. He was a key collaborator of Professor Stephen Hawking.[2] This book was written by Thomas Hertog at the request of Stephen Hawking at the end of his life in order to popularize the cosmological theory that they developed together.[3]
Synopsis
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 transcendent and immutable at the scale of the birth of our Universe as supposed by the theories of Newton and Einstein.
The discovery of Hawking and his PhD student was a total surprise. Quantum theory on the origin of the Universe led to an unexpected quantum theory on the origin of time. Time begins at the Big Bang as it also disappears in black holes. The quantum theory of the Big Bang is closely related to the quantum cosmological theory of black holes, the main contribution of Hawking to physics. The main outcome of their work is that the physics laws are contingent to the emerging phenomena and evolve with them. From there, the allusion made in the book to Darwin theory of evolution, because time and physics laws also co-evolve according to their theory.
The book describes Hawking and Hertog's top-down approach to Cosmology, used 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 similar way to the future and present.
The book's epigraph is "The question of origin hides the origin of the question", a sentence borrowed by Hertog from the Belgian poet François Jacquemin from Liège. In other words, as also stressed in an interview of Thomas Hertog, "The physical theory of the origin contains the origin of the theory".[3]
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.
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