About Hertog

On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory

A long time people thought, Nature is governed by fixed laws of nature like gravity, but also in cosmology this stable worldview has come to an end. Very few things are stable and do not change over time. The G10 invited Professor Hertog to talk about his book and his relation with Stephen Hawking. He will also talk about Hannah Arendt and about the 'mysterious sentence of Stephen Hawking' - what it means 'coming home' in cosmology.

Stephen and I discovered how physics itself can disappear back into the big bang. Not the laws as such but their capacity to change has the final word in our theory. This sheds new light on what cosmology is ultimately about.

According to Hertog, the new perspective that he has achieved with Hawking reverses the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics and is “profoundly Darwinian” in spirit. It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organizing entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics. Quoted from The Guardian, March 2023.

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Thomas Hertog on G10 2023

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