2023-05-28 10:20:00
It was in 1998, at the University of Cambridge. Stephen Hawking, already world famous, had summoned the student to become one of his doctoral students.
“There was a click between us,” recalls Thomas Hertog, now a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. This connection has never been interrupted although the eminent cosmologist, affected by Charcot’s disease, has lost the use of speech.
For twenty years, the duo worked closely together and built a new vision that disrupted the way science conceives the cosmos. This would be the “latest theory” of Stephen Hawking, who disappeared in 2018 at the age of 76.
Thomas Hertog exposes it for the first time in full in his book “The Origin of Time”, published in spring 2023 in the United Kingdom and France.
In an interview with AFP, the author recounted his collaboration with his mentor and friend. And describes how Hawking ultimately felt his seminal book ‘A Brief History of Time’, which sold more than 10 million copies, was written ‘from the wrong point of view’.
The universe responds to a “design”
From the outset, Hawking addressed the question that tormented him. “The universe we observe seems to respond to a design,” he told her through his dialog box, which gave him a robot voice.
“The laws of physics turn out to be perfect for the universe to be habitable”, develops Thomas Hertog.
This remarkable chain of favorable circumstances extends from the delicate balance allowing atoms to form the molecules necessary for chemistry, to the expansion of the universe itself, which allows the appearance of vast structures like the galaxies.
“From its violent birth, the universe emerged in a configuration spectacularly adapted to the development of life – even if this would not take place until billions of years later”, writes the scientist.
A “fashionable” answer to this conundrum is the multiverse, an idea that has recently become popular in film. This theory tries to explain the seemingly shaped nature of the universe, making it one of countless others, which would be “uninteresting, lifeless”, according to the 47-year-old cosmologist.
But Hawking realized the “great quagmire of paradoxes the multiverse was dragging us into.” The multiverse and even “A Brief History of Time” were “attempts to describe the creation and evolution of our universe from what Stephen would call a + divine perspective +”, continues Mr. Hertog.
For 15 years, the two scientists appealed to the strangeness of quantum theory to propose a new theory, from a new point of view.
“I thought it was over”
In 2008, Hawking lost the ability to use his chat box, further isolating himself. “I thought it was over,” says Mr. Hertog. But the duo developed “somewhat magical” non-verbal communication and were able to continue working.
He stood in front of the physicist, asked him questions while looking him in the eye. Hawking “had a very wide range of facial expressions, ranging from extreme disagreement to extreme excitement”. The link was such that it is according to him “impossible to distinguish” the ideas emanating from him or from Hawking.
Their theory focuses on what happened in the first moments following the Big Bang. Rather than a subsequent explosion of a pre-existing set of rules, they suggest that the laws of physics themselves evolved along with the universe.
So if you go back far enough in time, “the laws of physics begin to simplify and disappear,” says Hertog. “In the end, even the dimension of time evaporates.”
The laws of physics and time would have evolved in a way similar to biological evolution – the title of his work refers to Darwin’s “Origin of Species”.
“Biology and physics are two levels of a great evolutionary process”. However, it is difficult to prove this theory because the early years of the universe remain “hidden in the fog of the Big Bang”.
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