How to Change Physics From the Inside to Address the Deeper Question

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Science has taken a goal type perspective. It's reflected in the fact that we have these laws. The laws of physics are there as eternal truths. And so you have some sort of external viewpoint, external input. In astrophysics and cosmology, it is often fine because we rarely ask questions about truly the totality of reality. But when you ask this deeper question, which Stephen loved to ask, why is the universe the way it is? Why does it appear designed? What is the relation? At that point, you cannot stay outside. Because, of course, the question itself involves us. That really took us a long time to sort of break down this question... How do we change

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.

Shermer and Hertog discuss: what it was like working with Stephen Hawking • Darwinian model of cosmology • time • What banged the Big Bang? • cosmic inflation and multiple universes • how to reconcile Einstein’s relativity theory of gravity and quantum theory • Hawking’s no-boundary theory • why the universe appears designed • Feynman’s sum over histories approach to quantum physics • Is there purpose in the cosmos? • 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.