On the Origin of Time: The instant Sunday Times bestseller

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Not only does this theory unite the frontiers of quantum mechanics and cosmology, but, in a more philosophical sense, it is a profound statement on the importance of humankind.

For a time, there were multiple competing ideas which were all consistent with the observations we had.

Observationally, we don't know the answer to any of these questions. The Universe, as far as we can observe it, only contains information from the final 10 -33 seconds or so of inflation. Anything that occurred prior to that— which includes anything that would tell us how-or-if inflation began and what its duration was— gets wiped out, as far as what's observable to us, by the nature of inflation itself. But this severely alters our conceptions of how the Universe began. Earlier, I presented you a graph of how the size (or scale) of the Universe evolved with time. The graph displayed the differences between how the Universe would expand if it were dominated by matter (in red), radiation (in blue), or space itself (such as during inflation, in yellow) at early times. However, I wasn't completely honest with you in displaying that graph. Finally, the expanding Universe could have been an eternal state, where space is expanding now and always had been and always would be, where new matter is continuously created to keep the density constant. Jeffrey M. Friedman, Franz-Ulrich Hartl, Arthur L. Horwich, David Julius, Virginia Man-Yee Lee (2020)

The book's epigraph is "The question of origin hides the origin of the question", a sentence borrowed by Hertog from the Belgian poet François Jacquemin from Liège. In other words, as also stressed in an interview of Thomas Hertog, "The physical theory of the origin contains the origin of the theory". [3] With the idea of a quantum beginning in mind, Hertog spends an entire chapter toying with the multiverse: If the laws of the universe are determined by chance, what’s not to say there exists a sea of universes all exhibiting different properties? His prose shines here through vivid and imaginative visual imagery — he describes a bubbling sea of island universes, a gently curving spacetime that smooths out into a rounded bowl at the beginning of all things, and the “ the slow fading of the suns” that one sees by gazing into the embers of our origins — according to the astronomer Georges Lemaître whom Hertog repeatedly quotes.In particular, the patterns and magnitudes of the fluctuations that we've discovered in the modern radiation left over from that early, hot, dense state teach us a number of important properties about our Universe. They teach us how much matter was present in dark matter as well as normal matter: protons, neutrons and electrons. They give us a measurement of the Universe's spatial curvature, as well as the presence of dark energy and the effects of neutrinos. Saul Perlmutter and members of the Supernova Cosmology Project; Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess and members of the High-Z Supernova Team (2015)

In the first chapter, Hawking discusses the history of astronomical studies, particularly ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's conclusions about spherical Earth and a circular geocentric model of the Universe, later elaborated upon by the second-century Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Hawking then depicts the rejection of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic model and the gradual development of the currently accepted heliocentric model of the Solar System in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, first proposed by the Polish priest Nicholas Copernicus in 1514, validated a century later by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei and German scientist Johannes Kepler (who proposed an elliptical orbit model instead of a circular one), and further supported mathematically by English scientist Isaac Newton in his 1687 book on gravity, Principia Mathematica. Despite some baffling explanations in the penultimate chapter, Hertog saves the novel with a brilliant conclusion. Hertog explains in his final chapter that the implications of this final theory are broader than science, guiding humanity into a new era of progress. He holds a lofty, humanistic view of the future that lies before us — by marrying the universe’s origins to observation, we not only lay a comprehensive foundation for emerging science, but also adopt a deeply meaningful perspective that once again centers our place in the universe. According to Hertog, Hawking did not wish to make philosophy, but made philosophy when making quantum cosmology. Hawking wished to unravel the mysteries of physics and Universe and despite his physical condition was able to communicate his optimistic enthusiasm to his research group in Cambridge. The current quantum theory of the Big Bang presently dismisses the theory of multiverse, at least until it is disproved by new telescope observations or other mathematical theories. Hawking then describes Aristotle and Newton's belief in absolute time, i.e. time can be measured accurately regardless of the state of motion of the observer. However, Hawking writes that this commonsense notion does not work at or near the speed of light. He mentions Danish scientist Ole Rømer's discovery that light travels at a very high but finite speed through his observations of Jupiter and one of its moons Io as well as British scientist James Clerk Maxwell's equations on electromagnetism which showed that light travels in waves moving at a fixed speed. Since the notion of absolute rest was abandoned in Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell and many other physicists argued that light must travel through a hypothetical fluid called aether, its speed being relative to that of aether. This was later disproved by the Michelson–Morley experiment, showing that the speed of light always remains constant regardless of the motion of the observer. Einstein and Henri Poincaré later argued that there is no need for aether to explain the motion of light, assuming that there is no absolute time. The special theory of relativity is based on this, arguing that light travels with a finite speed no matter what the speed of the observer is. This section may be too long and excessively detailed. Please consider summarizing the material. ( January 2022)According to the Big Bang, the Universe was hotter, denser, more uniform and smaller in the past. It only has the properties we see today because it’s been expanding, cooling, and experiencing the influence of gravitation for so long. Because the wavelength of radiation stretches as the Universe expands, a smaller Universe should have had radiation with shorter wavelengths, meaning it had higher energies and greater temperatures.