On the Origin of Time: My Twenty-Year journey with Stephen Hawking to the Edge of Our Universe and the Beginning of Time

A new theory of the universe, twenty years in the making, by Stephen Hawking and his close collaborator Thomas Hertog.

One of the biggest questions Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. It is as if there is a hidden sub-plot at work, weaving together our existence with the basic rules on which the universe runs. Because our expanding universe is a bit like a black hole turned inside out, the Big Bang in the beginning is there for us to see, writ large on the sky. But Hawking's work to establish a conclusive origin theory ran into a crisis when the equations predicted a multiverse — countless different universes, most of which were too bizarre to support life.

Holed away in the physics department at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking and his collaborator Thomas Hertog worked for twenty years on a new theory of the cosmos. Incredibly, as their research took them closer and closer to the Big Bang, physical laws appeared to transform and simplify until particles, forces, and even time itself melted away. Once upon a time, perhaps, there was no time. This led them to a revolutionary idea: the laws of physics are not set in stone, but evolve even as the universe they govern takes shape.

On the Origin of Time is the story of a remarkable friendship forged by the quest to understand questions bigger than our universe, peering into the extreme physics of black holes and drawing on new developments in string theory. As Hawking's final days drew near, the two collaborators published a final paper proposing a radical new perspective on the origins of our universe — a new way of thinking that challenges how we think about our place in the order of the cosmos. This book is the legacy of their journey.

• Author
• Thomas Hertog

• Format
• hardcover

• Pages
• 304

• Publisher
• Bantam Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9781787631885

• Release date
• 2022