Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more / Men were deceivers ever / … Then sigh not so, but let them go / And be you blithe and bonny / Converting all your sounds of woe / Into hey nonny, nonny.
--from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing
This week’s publication of Tom Hertog’s “On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory” (Bantam) should have been a major media event, and yet I’ve found no mainstream U.S. reviews of the book.
My hunch is that many editors and other content providers still have nightmarish memories of dumb science books saying “Understanding Relativity is easy! Just imagine someone shining a laser beam from a train traveling at 186,000 miles per hour….” Enough said. That inscrutable anecdote still sends chills down my back.
But sigh no more, and sigh not so, for “On the Origin of Time” is blithe, bright and railroad-free.
Hertog, a Belgian theoretical physicist, wrote it after spending two decades at Hawking’s (wheelchair) side.
Hawking partnered with Hertog because he’d come to see that journeying back in time, however fun as a conceit in a few 1980s movies, was a theoretical dead end in physics.
What we call “the laws of physics,” the authors came to see, is little more than a “frozen accident,” a two-dimensional template that had evolved and changed many times before as the early universe cooled. (The template gains its third dimension through complex holography, which is the one bit of hard science I’ve decided to ignore to avoid choo-choo analogies that might shoo-shoo you away.)
Though Hawking pioneered the first widely accepted models of quantum physics four decades ago, he grew increasingly critical of Andrei Linde’s argument that inflation has forever been the universe’s default and eternal state. “The origin of inflation in their theory,” the authors write, “is that there was no origin.”
Thus the best Linde and colleagues can do is spin science-light tales about how our Something arose from Nothing.
Hertog and Hawking, alas, found greater freedom by dropping the assumption that one had to include the initial state or boundary condition in a cosmological model, which in English means starting inquiries in a place we know nothing about: the few moments before the Big Bang. They freed themselves, in other words, from the burden of wild philosophical speculation.
Linde’s hope, the authors assert, is that humans will find a way of looking at the cosmos from “the outside,” but they dismiss this as a pipe dream and deride his “truly bewildering picture of physical reality.”
Because, of course, we can’t look at our universe “from the outside.”
The surest way to send Hawking’s joystick spinning, Hertog found, was to remind him of the quantum notion he found most unpalatable: that the mere act of observing can change what’s observed.
Edwin Schrödinger argued, for example, that if you seal a cat in a box with an atom that might or might not be deadly, the cat will stay in a zombie like dead and alive state until you force it to make a decision when you unseal the box.
“When I hear the words Schrödinger’s cat,” Stephen told Hertog, “I reach for my gun.”
Hertog and Hawking found a way out of such quantum dead ends: “top-down” theories that start with observations of what we can see from within our galaxy. One image helps bring their approach home: that of the cone-shaped paper cups often dispensed near water coolers.
Most cosmologists turned the cup upside down and began theorizing about the tip, where the inverted V lines intersect: But the tip—representing the Big Bang—is so close to the “singularity”—the moment before the Big Bang—that information was nowhere to be found.
Hawking asked Hertog: Why not start at the wide mouth of the cup—the universe we can observe because that’s where we live?
From there, we can trace physical evolution back in time much as Darwin studied the history of biological evolution. We’d go before humans, then past multicellular organisms, then through geological and chemical layers until we get as close as possible to the Big Bang singularity.
The authors’ top-down cosmology may be Hawkings’ final theory, but the authors emphasize it’s by no means the final theory. At one low point in their partnership, Hertog laments that maybe “we’re just a chemical scum on a medium sized planet orbiting an average star in an ordinary galaxy.”
Hawking replies “Yes, from a God’s eye view, yes, we are an irrelevant speck …[but]…with the top-down approach we put humankind back in the center of cosmological theory…This is what gives us control in a quantum universe. We switch on the light.”