Science & Math
Astronomy & Space Science
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On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory
Stephen Hawking's closest collaborator offers the intellectual superstar's final thoughts on the cosmos-a dramatic revision of the theory he put forward in A Brief History of Time.
"This superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary individual, the creative process, and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the cosmos."-Lord Martin Rees
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.
"This superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary individual, the creative process, and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the cosmos."-Lord Martin Rees
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.
Editorial Reviews
"Why is our universe the way it is? How did everything begin? How might it end? Thomas Hertog probed these overwhelming questions in collaboration with Stephen Hawking, achieving a privileged perspective into how, struggling against daunting physical odds, Hawking's imprisoned mind yielded astonishing insights even in his later years. This superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary individual, the creative process generally, and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the cosmos."-Lord Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge, and author of Just Six Numbers
"Like his mentor and colleague Stephen Hawking, Thomas Hertog has never shied away from being ambitious in theorizing about the universe. This sweeping book provides an accessible overview of both what we know about cosmology and some audacious ideas for moving into the unknown. It is an introduction to Hawking's final theory, but also a glimpse into even grander theories yet to come."-Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion
"Stephen Hawking's final theory is lucidly explained in this splendidly accessible book. Author Thomas Hertog, one of Hawking's closest collaborators, gives us a vivid insight into Hawking as both a brilliant physicist and an astonishingly determined human being."-Graham Farmelo, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and author of The Strangest Man
"A beautifully written, thought-provoking account of both the physics and the personalities involved in Hawking's visionary struggle to comprehend the cosmos. Thomas Hertog has provided a fascinating insider's view."-Neil Turok, co-author of Endless Universe
"Like his mentor and colleague Stephen Hawking, Thomas Hertog has never shied away from being ambitious in theorizing about the universe. This sweeping book provides an accessible overview of both what we know about cosmology and some audacious ideas for moving into the unknown. It is an introduction to Hawking's final theory, but also a glimpse into even grander theories yet to come."-Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion
"Stephen Hawking's final theory is lucidly explained in this splendidly accessible book. Author Thomas Hertog, one of Hawking's closest collaborators, gives us a vivid insight into Hawking as both a brilliant physicist and an astonishingly determined human being."-Graham Farmelo, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and author of The Strangest Man
"A beautifully written, thought-provoking account of both the physics and the personalities involved in Hawking's visionary struggle to comprehend the cosmos. Thomas Hertog has provided a fascinating insider's view."-Neil Turok, co-author of Endless Universe
Readers Top Reviews
Dr CMS Catherwood: R
A wonderful book on a very complex subject. If Graham Farmelo's accessibility rating is 100%, this book is at least 88% and so can be read by humanities graduates like me without too much difficulty. And great to see Don Page and Jim Hartle get their place in the sun as well. Something to keep us going until the totally definitive official biography of Stephen Hawking comes out in the not too distant future.
J. Hirst
Hertog brings together Stephen Hawking's findings, sourced from so many people, including Schrodinger, Schwarzschild, Heisenberg, Einstein, Wheeler, Dirac Everett, and many more, but crucially he cites Darwins' "evolution and selection", the "sum over histories" of Richard Feynman fame, and the "delayed choice" version of the famous double slit wave function experiment, all of which helped crystalise his "top down" explanation of the evolution of the Universe, along with much discussion of the multiverse ( Which he, along with Carlo Rovelli, discard. ) and anthropic bias, ( Which is explored in another book, by Nick Bostrom. ) This, along with inflation, string theory, Higgs, etc. The argument is turned upside down as Hawking realises his early assumptions were wrong, and the book expertly comes to a truly amazing conclusion about time, the true nature of the so called laws of physics, the big bang and quantum cosmology as the evolution of the Universe. A final debate on holographic theories near the end of the book add to future discussions..
Samuel DickersonMarj
Physical edition, missing pages. Pages out of order.
kathleen g
This one is for Hawking fans. To be honest, it lost me early on but that's more on me than on Hertog, whose writing is clear and concise. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Over to science fans
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
A Paradox
Es könnte sich eine seltsame Analogie ergeben, daß das Okular auch des riesigsten Fernrohrs nicht größer sein darf, als unser Auge.
A curious correlation may emerge in that the eyepiece of even the biggest telescope cannot be larger than the human eye.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen
The late 1990s were the culmination of a golden decade of discovery in cosmology. Long regarded as a realm of unrestrained speculation, cosmology-the science that dares to study the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe as a whole-was finally coming of age. Scientists all over the world were buzzing with excitement about spectacular observations from sophisticated satellites and Earth-based instruments that were transforming our picture of the universe beyond recognition. It was as if the universe was speaking to us. These developments posed quite a reality check for theoreticians, who were told to rein in their speculation and flesh out the predictions of their models.
In cosmology we discover the past. Cosmologists are time travelers, and telescopes their time machines. When we look into deep space we look back into deep time, because the light from distant stars and galaxies has traveled millions or even billions of years to reach us. Already in 1927 the Belgian priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître predicted that space, when considered over such long periods of time, expands. But it wasn't until the 1990s that advanced telescope technology made it possible to trace the universe's history of expansion.
This history held some surprises. For example, in 1998 astronomers discovered that the stretching of space had begun to speed up around five billion years ago, even though all known forms of matter attract and should therefore slow down the expansion. Since then, physicists have wondered whether this weird cosmic acceleration is driven by Einstein's cosmological constant, an invisible ether-like dark energy that causes gravity to repel rather than to attract. One astronomer quipped that the universe looks like Los Angeles: one-third substance and two-thirds energy.
Obviously, if the universe is expanding now, it must have been more compressed in the past. If you run cosmic history backward-as a mathematical exercise, of course-you find that all matter would once have been very densely packed together and also very hot, since matter heats up and radiates when it is squeezed together. This primeval state is known as the hot big bang. Astronomical observations since the golden 1990s have pinned down the age of the universe-the time elapsed since the big bang-to 13.8 billion years, give or take 20 million.
Curious to learn more about the universe's birth, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite in May 2009 in a bid to complete the most detailed and ambitious scanning of the night sky ever undertaken. The target was an intriguing pattern of flickers in the heat radiation left over from the big bang. Having traveled through the expanding cosmos for 13.8 billion years, the heat from the universe's birth reaching us today is cold: 2.725 K, or about –270 degrees Celsius. Radiation at this temperature lies mainly in the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum, so the remnant heat is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB radiation.
ESA's efforts to capture the ancient heat culminated in 2013 when a curious speckled image resembling a pointillist painting decorated the front pages of the world's newspapers. This image is reproduced in figure 2, which shows a projection of the entire sky, compiled in exquisite detail from millions of pixels representing the temperature of the relic CMB radiation in different directions in space. Such detailed observations of the CMB radiation provide a snapshot of what the universe was like a mere 380,000 years after the big bang, when it had cooled to a few thousand degrees, cold enough to liberate the primeval radiation, which has traveled unhindered through the cosmos ever since.
The CMB sky map confirms that the relic big bang heat is nearly uniformly distributed throughout space, although not quite perfectly. The speckles in the image represent minuscule temperature variations indeed, tiny flickers of no more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree. These slight variations, however small, are crucially important, because they trace the seeds around which galaxies would eventually form. Had the hot big bang been perfectly uniform everywhere, there would be no galaxies today.
The ancient CMB snapshot marks our cosmological horizon: We cannot look back any farther. But we can glean something about processes op...
A Paradox
Es könnte sich eine seltsame Analogie ergeben, daß das Okular auch des riesigsten Fernrohrs nicht größer sein darf, als unser Auge.
A curious correlation may emerge in that the eyepiece of even the biggest telescope cannot be larger than the human eye.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen
The late 1990s were the culmination of a golden decade of discovery in cosmology. Long regarded as a realm of unrestrained speculation, cosmology-the science that dares to study the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe as a whole-was finally coming of age. Scientists all over the world were buzzing with excitement about spectacular observations from sophisticated satellites and Earth-based instruments that were transforming our picture of the universe beyond recognition. It was as if the universe was speaking to us. These developments posed quite a reality check for theoreticians, who were told to rein in their speculation and flesh out the predictions of their models.
In cosmology we discover the past. Cosmologists are time travelers, and telescopes their time machines. When we look into deep space we look back into deep time, because the light from distant stars and galaxies has traveled millions or even billions of years to reach us. Already in 1927 the Belgian priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître predicted that space, when considered over such long periods of time, expands. But it wasn't until the 1990s that advanced telescope technology made it possible to trace the universe's history of expansion.
This history held some surprises. For example, in 1998 astronomers discovered that the stretching of space had begun to speed up around five billion years ago, even though all known forms of matter attract and should therefore slow down the expansion. Since then, physicists have wondered whether this weird cosmic acceleration is driven by Einstein's cosmological constant, an invisible ether-like dark energy that causes gravity to repel rather than to attract. One astronomer quipped that the universe looks like Los Angeles: one-third substance and two-thirds energy.
Obviously, if the universe is expanding now, it must have been more compressed in the past. If you run cosmic history backward-as a mathematical exercise, of course-you find that all matter would once have been very densely packed together and also very hot, since matter heats up and radiates when it is squeezed together. This primeval state is known as the hot big bang. Astronomical observations since the golden 1990s have pinned down the age of the universe-the time elapsed since the big bang-to 13.8 billion years, give or take 20 million.
Curious to learn more about the universe's birth, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite in May 2009 in a bid to complete the most detailed and ambitious scanning of the night sky ever undertaken. The target was an intriguing pattern of flickers in the heat radiation left over from the big bang. Having traveled through the expanding cosmos for 13.8 billion years, the heat from the universe's birth reaching us today is cold: 2.725 K, or about –270 degrees Celsius. Radiation at this temperature lies mainly in the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum, so the remnant heat is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB radiation.
ESA's efforts to capture the ancient heat culminated in 2013 when a curious speckled image resembling a pointillist painting decorated the front pages of the world's newspapers. This image is reproduced in figure 2, which shows a projection of the entire sky, compiled in exquisite detail from millions of pixels representing the temperature of the relic CMB radiation in different directions in space. Such detailed observations of the CMB radiation provide a snapshot of what the universe was like a mere 380,000 years after the big bang, when it had cooled to a few thousand degrees, cold enough to liberate the primeval radiation, which has traveled unhindered through the cosmos ever since.
The CMB sky map confirms that the relic big bang heat is nearly uniformly distributed throughout space, although not quite perfectly. The speckles in the image represent minuscule temperature variations indeed, tiny flickers of no more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree. These slight variations, however small, are crucially important, because they trace the seeds around which galaxies would eventually form. Had the hot big bang been perfectly uniform everywhere, there would be no galaxies today.
The ancient CMB snapshot marks our cosmological horizon: We cannot look back any farther. But we can glean something about processes op...
