Book review: On The Origin Of Time*

*Unfortunately, this was an accidentally published draft that wasn’t quite ready. I don’t want to spam people’s inboxes with explanations, but I wanted to put something here.

Just skimming it, I can already see that I didn’t explain the anthropic principle, there are a bunch of minor errors, there are no images, and the whole thing isn’t in Spanish. I don't think it's worth apologizing for, but it's not my best post either.

How I Got Here

Since I am not the strong and silent type, I've been putting a lot of my questions to various corners of the internet lately: How do we know science is real? Is the anthropic principle weak proof of God? Is the fossil record just wishful thinking? How reliable is radiometric dating? Was Noah's Flood literal? What happens if AGI is the long awaited Messiah?

Okay, maybe not that last one.

Anyway, a smart person suggested this book when we erred discusing the Noah's Flood. Another smart person had earlier suggested Are Quanta Real?, which humbled me effectively. You're all smarter than me. Yes, you. Everyone reading this.

About Thomas Hertog
The back jacket of the hardcover version mentions his wife and 4 children. Also, he's professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leuven, where he studies the quantum nature of the big bang. Hertog was a close collaborator of Stephen Hawking for over 20 years.
Possibly because I'm not smart enough to understand quantum cosmology, these little biographical details always make me wonder about the person behind the books. Usually I can criticize them for idolatry and immorality.
Unfortunately, in his case, I couldn't find anything to look down on - he comes across as a nice and kind person. I would go to a lecture by him one day.

What I Expected vs. Reality
I thought the book would be like this:

Quote from: ridiculous fantasy

Hawking and Hertog are having their quantum tea served by a young European student, wearing ties like proper Europeans do and casually mentioning how they only speak 25 languages.
Hertog opens a door labeled “Multiverse” and finds countless versions of himself and Hawking, some religious. The two decide to ignore their alternate selves and get back to work. Especially since you can't disprove them anyway
Hawking tries to write out an equation while the blackboard stretches into infinity. Then it turns into a black hole. Meanwhile, Hertog reaches for his tea cup and discovers it’s a holographic 2D projection. He watches as their notes change retroactively. Suddenly, it clicks. They need to understand time not forwards, but backwards.
Not yet "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking, nor "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality" by Brian Greene, nor yet "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli. Not even "Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe" by Lee Smolin or "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" by Kip Thorne or "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time" by Sean Carroll or "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman or "The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics" by Julian Barbour or "About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution" by Paul Davies, not even "The Nature of Space and Time" by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose
The Origin of Time is that the laws of physics evolved alongside the universe itself.
Seen from a worm’s-eye view, Hawkings new understanding is recorded by his ever present nurse. Tap tap tap and his academic family has a reunion at the easiest convention. And we have yet another physics book with the word time in it. I tried mightily to come up with a joke about time to put here, but I failed.

I also seem to have gotten lost somewhere in the middle but it is , after all, quantum cosmology, so surely there is no shame in that.

What The Book Is Actually About
According to the book:

“Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life.”

As you know, I personally solve this mystery with G-d, but clearly, that wouldn’t work for Stephen Hawking.

To solve it, he studied the Big Bang origin of the universe.

However, his early work displeased him when his own math predicted many Big Bangs, resulting in a multiverse — countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to harbor life. My understanding is that this would lead to a strong anthropic principle, which he couldn’t accept due to his atheism.

Essentially, it reads to me as though he went very, very far to argue that there’s no system to the world but couldn’t ultimately prove it either. So this book chronicles Stephen Hawking's final collaboration with Thomas Hertog, exploring the mysteries of the cosmos and the emergence of life. Together, they discovered a deeper level of evolution where the physical laws themselves transform and simplify — to the point where particles, forces, and even time fade away.

Their work suggests that the laws of physics are not set in stone but evolve alongside the universe. This offers a kind of Darwinian perspective on physics and may represent Hawking's greatest cosmological legacy: the development of a new quantum theory of the cosmos.

To me, this seems like scientific apologetics: he didn’t like where his results were leading, so he developed a more Darwinian theory to fit his preferences. I couldn’t understand any of the math, but that’s how it comes across.

Key Concepts You Can Expect Me To Know In The Future

1. Hawking's Approach
Instead of starting at the Big Bang and moving forward, Hawking proposes working backward from the known physics of the universe to derive its origins. Whatever that means.

He calls this a "worm's-eye view". This perspective brings to mind the teaching in Pirkei Avos (4:4): "Be exceedingly humble, for the end of man is the worm." We must ground ourselves (sorry) with our earth-level perspective. I couldn't be more humble, so there was nowhere for me to go with this.

2. Wave Function of the Universe
This backward approach creates a new mathematical wave function for the universe, which they think provides a more accurate description of the universe compared to traditional models.

A wave function is “a mathematical function describing all possible states of a system.” I figure this means something like quantum.

3. Yes, Virginia, This Has Mathematical Rigor
He emphasizes that while the concepts are complex, this is the result of rigorous mathematical work.

I can only take his word for it.

On page 42, there is the following paragraph, which I feel compelled to reproduce: "

Quote

This equation isn't difficult to read. On the right-hand side, we have all the matter, energy, and original space-time, denoted by T subscript μν. The left side describes the geometry, G subscript μν, of that region. The equal sign in the middle is where the magic happens and tells, with mathematical precision, how the geometry of space-time on the left is tied to a given configuration of matter and energy on the right. This relationship, Einstein says, is what we experience as gravity. Gravity doesn't enter reality as an independent force but rather emerges from the interplay between matter and the shape of space-time."

4. The Cosmology and Physics Connection
One of the great challenges of modern physics is combining relativity and quantum mechanics into a unified theory.

Einstein's Relativity: Explains large-scale phenomena (stars, planets, galaxies)

Quantum Physics: Describes the behavior of tiny particles, including phenomena like wave-particle duality and entanglement.

Hertog's job is figuring out how G-d did it. It's quantum.

5. Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Cosmology

Bottom-Up: Traditional way of explaining the universe by starting from the Big Bang

Top-Down: Starting with current state and working backward, suggesting present reality influences the past. More quantum.

6. The Observer Is Not What You Think It is
Hertog uses quantum experiments to explain what an "observer" means. In quantum physics, an observer isn't someone with eyes watching - it's any interaction that forces a quantum system to "pick" a definite state.

Double-Slit Experiment: Particles act like waves until they interact with something (the "observer"), then they suddenly behave like particles

Delayed-Choice Experiment: Even weirder - the particle's past behavior changes based on later interactions

This is important because Hertog uses this idea to talk about the early universe. There weren't any people around to "observe" things back then, but there were physical interactions that could force quantum systems to make up their minds about what state they were in. At least it's not New Jersey.

7. The Holographic Universe

Imagine looking at a hologram credit card - it's flat, but you can see a 3D image. All the information about our 3D world could be stored on a flat surface, like the way your entire life is stored as 1s and 0s on a chip.

This means things that we take for granted - time, space, even gravity - could be more like "side effects" that emerge from deeper quantum processes, the way wetness emerges when you get enough water molecules together (even though individual molecules aren't "wet").

I'm honestly not sure if this makes it clearer or more confusing, but there you have it.

8. Frozen Accidents and Complexity

Hawking and Hertog suggest that our universe is playing a cosmic game of freeze tag - once something gets "frozen" in place, everything that comes after has to work with that random choice. For instance, the exact strength of gravity or the mass of an electron seem random, but once these values were set, they shape everything that followed.

Think of those Russian nesting dolls (Matryoshka dolls): the innermost doll (those basic physical constants) determines what the next larger doll can look like, and so on, until you get to complex things like galaxies, planets, and even life itself. Each layer builds on the "accidents" that came before.

At least, that's what I think they're saying. Physics is hard.

9. The Multiverse Isn't Real, Because Here We Are

Earlier in his career, Hawking's math suggested there might be countless parallel universes out there - imagine every possible version of reality existing somewhere. But then in this final work with Hertog, he changed his mind. Instead of a multiverse where anything and everything happens somewhere, they proposed that quantum physics actually narrows things down to our single, specific universe.

It's like going from "every possible story exists in some parallel universe" to "actually, there's just this one story, and quantum mechanics helps explain why it turned out this way."

So it's the quantum anthropic principle.

What I Actually Remember

On page 38, he mentions that his sister has a sports car.

In plate 5, there's a fascinating article from the NY Times about Georges Lemaître, who was both a Catholic priest and the scientist who first proposed the Big Bang theory. While Einstein believed in a static universe (which fit nicely with Aristotelian philosophy), Lemaître followed the math to suggest an expanding universe with a definite beginning.

What I love about Lemaître is how he navigated faith and science. When Pope Pius XII tried to use the Big Bang as proof of Genesis, Lemaître actually discouraged him. I don’t understand why. He believed that while science and faith could coexist, they shouldn't try to prove each other.

This feels relevant to Hawking because both men followed their calculations even when the results challenged their personal preferences - Lemaître towards a beginning he hadn't sought, Hawking away from a multiverse he probably would have preferred, and towards an anthropic principle.

There are lots of references to his nurse and methods of communication. There is also a lot of pictures. The obligatory Escher pictures are included. But so is a picture of his academic family.

The end