337. On the Origin of Time Thomas Hertog on Stephen Hawkings Final Theory
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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 \\u2014 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.
Shermer and Hertog discuss: what it was like working with Stephen Hawking \\u2022 Darwinian model of cosmology \\u2022 time \\u2022 What banged the Big Bang? \\u2022 cosmic inflation and multiple universes \\u2022 how to reconcile Einstein\\u2019s relativity theory of gravity and quantum theory \\u2022 Hawking\\u2019s no-boundary theory \\u2022 why the universe appears designed \\u2022 Feynman\\u2019s sum over histories approach to quantum physics \\u2022 Is there purpose in the cosmos? \\u2022 Why is there something rather than nothing?
Thomas Hertog is an internationally renowned cosmologist who was for many years a close collaborator of the late Stephen Hawking. He received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge and is currently professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leuven, where he studies the quantum nature of the Big Bang. He lives with his wife and their four children in Bousval, Belgium.
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