On the Origin of Time: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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In this chapter, Hawking describes the development of scientific thought regarding the nature of space and time. He first describes the Aristotelian idea that the naturally preferred state of a body is to be at rest, and which can only be moved by force, implying that heavier objects will fall faster. However, Italian scientist Galileo Galilei experimentally proved Aristotle's theory wrong with by observing the motion of objects of different weights and concluding that all objects would fall at the same rate. This eventually led to English scientist Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravity. However, Newton's laws implied that there is no such thing as absolute state of rest or absolute space as believed by Aristotle: whether an object is 'at rest' or 'in motion' depends on the inertial frame of reference of the observer. Jeffrey M. Friedman, Franz-Ulrich Hartl, Arthur L. Horwich, David Julius, Virginia Man-Yee Lee (2020) 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. The Universe could be expanding today because it was contracting in the past, and will contract again in the future, presenting an oscillating solution.

Chapter 1: Our Picture of the Universe [ edit ] Ptolemy's Earth-centric model about the location of the planets, stars, and Sun Mass and energy are related by the famous equation E = m c 2 {\displaystyle E=mc Jeffery W. Kelly, Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman, Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer (2022) Our entire cosmic history is theoretically well-understood, but only qualitatively. It's by ... [+] observationally confirming and revealing various stages in our Universe's past that must have occurred, like when the first stars and galaxies formed, and how the Universe expanded over time, that we can truly come to understand our cosmos. The relic signatures imprinted on our Universe from an inflationary state before the hot Big Bang give us a unique way to test our cosmic history. Nicole Rager Fuller / National Science FoundationIn the first chapter, Hawking discusses the history of astronomical studies, particularly ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's conclusions about spherical Earth and a circular geocentric model of the Universe, later elaborated upon by the second-century Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Hawking then depicts the rejection of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic model and the gradual development of the currently accepted heliocentric model of the Solar System in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, first proposed by the Polish priest Nicholas Copernicus in 1514, validated a century later by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei and German scientist Johannes Kepler (who proposed an elliptical orbit model instead of a circular one), and further supported mathematically by English scientist Isaac Newton in his 1687 book on gravity, Principia Mathematica. Whenever we think about anything, we apply our very human logic to it. If we want to know where the Big Bang came from, we describe it in the best terms we can, and then theorize about what could have caused it and set it up. We look for evidence to help us understand the Big Bang's beginnings. After all, that's where everything comes from: from the process that gave it its start. According to the Big Bang, the Universe was hotter, denser, more uniform and smaller in the past. It only has the properties we see today because it’s been expanding, cooling, and experiencing the influence of gravitation for so long. Because the wavelength of radiation stretches as the Universe expands, a smaller Universe should have had radiation with shorter wavelengths, meaning it had higher energies and greater temperatures. Like many great discoveries in science, this leads to a slew of delightful new questions, including:

While the book endeavors to be accessible, it is still a tad dense. Concepts that Hertog thinks should be easily understood are oftentimes quite complicated, and certain ideas do not feel fully explained before Hertog leaps onto the next. At times, the cyclical, metaphysical reasoning becomes convoluted, which may leave the reader feeling overwhelmed. Ultimately, readers will still walk away with an understanding of modern cosmology and a new outlook on our role in the universe, if they can avoid getting lost in the technicalities. This section may be too long and excessively detailed. Please consider summarizing the material. ( January 2022) In a hypertorus model of the Universe, motion in a straight line will return you to your original ... [+] location. If time is like a torus, it may be cyclical in nature, rather than having always existed or coming into existence a finite amount of time ago. We do not, even today, know the origin of time. ESO and deviantART user InTheStarlightGarden With bold chapter names like “Cosmogenesis,” “Lost in the Multiverse,” and “Time without Time,” one can expect their assumptions to be truly tested by the scope of this book. That is indeed the case: Hertog effectively guides the reader through mind-boggling possibilities that describe the origin and make-up of the universe, from nine-dimensional space in string theory to an infinitely diverging multiverse.After introducing this revolutionary way of thinking about cosmology, Hertog attempts to underpin the theory by describing others it validates, such as string theory’s second revolution, quantum field theory and anti-de Sitter space, and holographic duality. This section suffers from overly complex and convoluted exposition — while Hertog’s enthusiasm for the subject is a driving force throughout the novel, he risks losing the reader as he becomes caught up in the intricacies of theories that twist and turn in ways that are hard to follow. Hertog’s novel is an all-encompassing, if occasionally meandering, synthesis of Hawking’s final theory, the historical context of past discoveries, and the philosophy underlying these powerful ideas. In a pioneering work that is both grounded in science and deeply profound, Hertog carefully unfolds Hawking’s final perspective and grand design for the universe in a compelling blend of science and story. Not only does this theory unite the frontiers of quantum mechanics and cosmology, but, in a more philosophical sense, it is a profound statement on the importance of humankind. Despite some baffling explanations in the penultimate chapter, Hertog saves the novel with a brilliant conclusion. Hertog explains in his final chapter that the implications of this final theory are broader than science, guiding humanity into a new era of progress. He holds a lofty, humanistic view of the future that lies before us — by marrying the universe’s origins to observation, we not only lay a comprehensive foundation for emerging science, but also adopt a deeply meaningful perspective that once again centers our place in the universe. Special: Stephen Hawking, Peter Jenni, Fabiola Gianotti (ATLAS), Michel Della Negra, Tejinder Virdee, Guido Tonelli, Joseph Incandela (CMS) and Lyn Evans (LHC) (2013)

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] Cornelia Bargmann, David Botstein, Lewis C. Cantley, Hans Clevers, Titia de Lange, Napoleone Ferrara, Eric Lander, Charles Sawyers, Robert Weinberg, Shinya Yamanaka and Bert Vogelstein (2013)

Finally, the expanding Universe could have been an eternal state, where space is expanding now and always had been and always would be, where new matter is continuously created to keep the density constant. Singularities are where the law of gravitation governing the Universe — Einstein’s General Relativity —yields nonsense for predictions. Relativity, remember, is the theory that describes space and time. But at singularities, both spatial and temporal dimensions cease to exist. Asking questions like “what came before this event where time began” is as nonsensical as asking “where am I” if space no longer exists. Hawking then describes Aristotle and Newton's belief in absolute time, i.e. time can be measured accurately regardless of the state of motion of the observer. However, Hawking writes that this commonsense notion does not work at or near the speed of light. He mentions Danish scientist Ole Rømer's discovery that light travels at a very high but finite speed through his observations of Jupiter and one of its moons Io as well as British scientist James Clerk Maxwell's equations on electromagnetism which showed that light travels in waves moving at a fixed speed. Since the notion of absolute rest was abandoned in Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell and many other physicists argued that light must travel through a hypothetical fluid called aether, its speed being relative to that of aether. This was later disproved by the Michelson–Morley experiment, showing that the speed of light always remains constant regardless of the motion of the observer. Einstein and Henri Poincaré later argued that there is no need for aether to explain the motion of light, assuming that there is no absolute time. The special theory of relativity is based on this, arguing that light travels with a finite speed no matter what the speed of the observer is. The book describes Hawking and Hertog's top-down approach to Cosmology, utilized 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 similiar way to the future and present.