The Wave Function of the Universe

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In the 1960s, Stephen Hoking showed using pen roses techniques that the Big Bang is a singularity where Einstein's theory breaks down. He and Jim Hartle then came up with an explicit model of how you would go about giving a quantum description of the creation of the universe. And their trick was really to sort of in a way, bend the time dimension of Einstein's theory into a space dimension. If your reality is pure space dimensions, you can just round it off like a sphere.

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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