The Early and Late Stephen Hawking

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I like to think what you're doing is more than art it's not just an artsy trend right that could go this way or this that way hopefully it's driven by well mathematics and empiricism. I knew Stephen Weinberg a little bit mostly because traveling in atheist circles so he did have something of a reputation of being a little kind of an angry atheist a little bit and so maybe some of that fuels the interpretation of comments like thatYeah yeah it's interesting you know you talk about the early Stephen Hawking and the later Stephen Hawking it's the kind of thing you hear like the the early Van Gogh before he was an impressionist and then the later Van Gogh we came,

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.