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.
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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.
