The Origin of Time

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In a way, what we have been trying to do in cosmology ever since the discovery of the big bang is to let time, when we go backwards disappear in a controlled fashion. And that's essentially that has essentially been the goal. But it's kind of interesting that this hypothesis that I developed with Hawking is very different. It's taking the idea of an origin very seriously. In fact, even more seriously than the early Hawking would have done and so, it's really sort of placing that notion of an originvery central in our thinking about the early universe.

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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