Thomas Hertog - On The Origin Of Time (Torva, 2023) ****

Belgian physicist Thomas Hertog had the privilege to work with Stephan Hawking during the last decade of his life, and this book tries to capture the essence and the changes in Hawking's thinking over the years, but it is also a testimony of friendship and admiration for the great physicist. 

The book starts with the paradoxes that philosophers and scientists have struggled with for thousands of years: why is there such a thing as life? is there a plan behind it? and why are there laws that govern us? Hertog narrates well, exceptionally well for such a complex, confusing and hard to understand subject. He starts by going back in time, human time, to the ancient Greeks and builds his narrative up with the building blocks that we are familiar with. So far, so good, and we as lay people can still follow. 

One of the leading characters in Hertog's book is his fellow countryman George Lemaître, the physicist and priest whose concept of the expanding universe led to a breakthrough in theoretical physics and astronomy. It took some time, but eventually Einstein became also convinced that Lemaître was correct. In this way Hertog takes us from each step to the next step, a new theory, new findings, challenges, and corrections, which lead to new theories. It is a great ode to the power of science and to the open-mindedness of scientists who through debate and correspondence accept that other viewpoints and findings are more accurately reflecting the complex realities out there. 

But he also describes the changes in Hawking's own theories and perspectives, possibly challenged by himself only, thinking ever deeper into the nature of our universe. Hertog tries to explain all this by using drawings and analogies, but they only lead us so far in understanding the complexity of what the theories entail. Without the mathematics, it is hard to fathom what they are really talking about (not that we would understand it with the mathematics, of course). 

I can only encourage readers to keep reading, even of some of the findings are incomprehensible. 

"STEPHEN'S NO-BOUNDARY MODEL of the beginning-conceived from the top down!-is key to realize the fundamentally historical perspective on physics and cosmology that I have advocated, a view of physics that in­cludes the genesis of the laws. The no-boundary hypothesis predicts that if we trace the primordial universe as far back in time as we possibly can, its structural properties continue to evaporate and transmute and that this extends, ultimately, to time itself. Time would initially have been melded with space into something like a higher-dimensional sphere, closing the universe into nothingness. This led the early Hawking, still reasoning in a causal bottom -up fashion, to proclaim that the universe was created from nothing. But Hawking's final theory offers a radically different interpreta­tion of this closure of spacetime at the big bang. The later Hawking held that this nothingness at the beginning is nothing like the emptiness of a vacuum, out of which universes may or may not be born, but a much more profound, epistemic horizon involving no space, no time, and, crucially, no physical laws. "The origin of time" in Stephen's final theory is the limit of what can be said about our past, not just the beginning of all that is. This view is especially borne out by the holographic form of the theory where the dimension of time and hence the basic notion of evolution, the epitome of reductionist concepts, are seen as emergent qualities of the universe. From a holographic viewpoint, going back in time is like taking an increasingly fuzzy look at the hologram. One quite literally sheds more and more of the information that it encodes until, well, one runs out of qubits. That would be the beginning."(p. 257) 

Fascinating, mind-boggling, and utterly perplexing. 

I can only encourage readers to read it.