Tomo Seratog: How does one become Stephen Hawking's collaborator? Joan Boudreau: There was a folklore. Whoever got top scores in their famous Part III course would get an invitation to go talk to Stephen. So that's essentially what happened, then what happened to many other students in different years. And so there I was. How could I possibly have an opinion of the multiverse and Andre Linde as a 22-year-old student?"
Is there a multiverse, and if so, how should we think of ourselves within it? In many modern cosmological models, the universe includes more than one realm, with possibly different laws of physics, and these realms may or may not include intelligent observers. There is a longstanding puzzle about how, in such a scenario, we should calculate what we, as presumably intelligent observers ourselves, should expect to see. Today's guest, Thomas Hertog, is a physicist and longstanding collaborator of Stephen Hawking. They worked together (often with James Hartle) to address these questions, and the work is still ongoing.
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Thomas Hertog received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven. His new book is On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory.
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