Hawking had said The Chronicle of Time was ‘wrong’: pioneering cosmologist’s new theory put forward by his Cambridge colleague

In 2002, Thomas Hertog received an email calling him In the office of mentor Stephen Hawking.

The young researcher rushed to Hawking’s office in Cambridge. “His eyes were sparkling with excitement,” Hertog recalled.

Hawking announced, by typing into the computer-controlled vocal system that allowed the leading cosmologist to communicate:

“I’ve changed my mind. My book is A Brief History of Time [το Χρονικό του Χρόνου, στα ελληνικά] It is written from the wrong perspective.”

Thus, one of the best-selling science books in the history of publication, with worldwide sales exceeding 10 million, was sent to the trash by its author himself.

• The History of Time by Stephen Hawking is a publishing phenomenon. It has been translated into at least 40 languages, and has sold millions of copies worldwide. It is now considered a classic. When it was first published in 1988, the ideas analyzed in its pages came from the cutting edge of cosmology research. The original title of the book was: A Brief History of Time. In the intervening time, great progress has been made in the technology of observing both the microcosm and the macrocosm, so cosmology and theoretical physics have entered a golden age. Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest scientists who contributed to this renaissance.

Hawking and Hertog then began working on a new way of summarizing his latest ideas about the universe.

At the end of the month, five years after Hawking’s death, this book – On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Last Theory – will be published in the UK.

Hertog will describe its origins and themes at a lecture in Cambridge on March 31.

• “Hawking’s problem was his struggle to understand how the universe could create conditions perfectly suitable for life,” says Hertog, a cosmologist at KU Leuven in Belgium.

Examples of these life-supporting conditions include the delicate balance that exists between particle forces that allow chemistry and complex molecules to exist.

• Furthermore, the fact that there are only three dimensions of space allows stable solar systems to evolve and provide homes for living things. Some cosmologists argue that without these properties, the universe likely would not have created life as we know it.

Hertog and Hawking began to explain this stellar uncertainty after the latter decided that his previous efforts had not been sufficient.

• “Steven told me he now thought he was wrong, and so we worked side by side for the next 20 years to develop a new theory of the universe, which could better explain the appearance of life,” Hertog said. .

It was a useful collaboration, but not an easy one. When he was 21, Hawking was diagnosed with a slowly-onset motor neurone disease that gradually paralyzed his movement.

By the time he began working with Hertog, he had become Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world (Issac Newton was a previous holder of the title), and had produced a number of fascinating theories on general relativity, black holes, and the origin of the universe as well as his best-selling book Brief history of time.

However, his condition worsened. He was in a wheelchair and could only communicate using a small computer from which he would select the words spoken by his speech synthesizer.

“In the middle of our partnership, he lost the remaining strength in his hand to press the clicker he was using to chat with him,” says Hertog.

So, Hawking resorted to a sensor attached to his glasses that could be activated by twitching a cheek muscle, but in the end that became too difficult.

Hertog said it slowed from a few words per minute to several minutes per word.

Eventually the connection stopped.

I would stand in front of him and ask him to look him in the eyes to see if he agreed or not. In the end, I was able to discover many levels of “no” and many levels of “yes”, with some levels in between. “

From these “conversations” Hawking’s final theory was born and, in combination with Hertog’s own analysis, formed the basis of The Origin of Time, a book based on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

• “In the end, we both thought about physics in a way much closer to how we think about biology. We put physics and biology on an equal footing.”

According to Hertog, On the Origin of Time deals with questions about our place in the universe and what makes our universe suitable for life.

“These questions have always been in the background in our scholarly publications. What I did for this book was make these questions central and tell our story from that perspective.

• “Steven and I have discovered how physics itself can disappear back into the Big Bang. It is not the laws per se, but their ability to change that have the final word on our theory. This sheds new light on what cosmology is.”

According to Heroges, the new perspective he achieved with Hawking reflects the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics and is “deeply Darwinian” in spirit.

It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by immutable laws of preexisting existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organizing entity in which all kinds of emergent patterns emerge, which we generally call the laws of physics.

with information from Watchman

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