Book Reviewed: On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory by Thomas Hertog

Time and physical laws are emergent phenomenon Stephen Hawking in his final theory, no­ boundary hypothesis proposes that our universe is a self-containing entity with no sharp starting point. Instead, it is described as a smooth finite wave function that extends back infinitely. According to this there is no singularity, the tiniest space where the big bang is supposed to have occurred. Therefore, the universe has no true beginning, and hence no need to invoke a cause or creator for its existence. Stephen Hawking strove much of his life to give a fundamentally causal explanation of the universe's origin. But his holographic cosmology tells us that physics and its laws fade away when we journey back into the big bang. This no-boundary hypothesis emerges from holography not so much as a law of the beginning but more as a beginning of the physics laws. The ultimate cause of the big bang becomes irrelevant in this theory. In a quantum universe, a tangible past and future emerge out of a haze of possibilities by means of a continual process of questioning and observing. This interactive process transforms and constantly draws the universe more firmly into existence. Observers in this quantum sense acquire a sort of creative role in cosmic affairs that imbues a delicate subjective touch. Conscious observation introduces a subtle backward-in-time element into cosmological theory. The act of observation today retroactively fixes the outcome of the big bang "back then.” Hence Hawking referred to his final theory as “top-down cosmology.” This meta-evolution has a Darwinian flavor, with its interplay of variation and selection playing out in the primeval environment of the early universe. Variation enters because random quantum jumps cause frequent small excursions from deterministic behavior. Selection enters because some of these excursions, especially the larger ones, are amplified and frozen with new new rules that help shape the subsequent cosmic evolution. The interaction between these two competing forces in the furnace of the hot big bang produces a branching process analogous to how biological species emerged on this planet. The biological and cosmological evolutions aren't fundamentally separate phenomena but two vastly different levels of one giant evolutionary path that freed from any claims of divine involvement in the creation of life or the cosmos. One of the shortcomings of this book is that physicist Lee Smolin proposed the cosmological natural selection that is analogous to biological natural selection. Smolin published the idea in 1992 and summarized it in a book called The Life of the Cosmos. His work is never mentioned in this book. Secondly, the recent advances in physics seem to suggest that physical reality is the same as described by the Advaita Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. The current theory of Stephen Hawking is not any different, but the author never invokes this school of thought.