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

A lot of information needs to be processed by my brain while reading this book. First, I am no physicist, but I love being updated on significant discoveries. This book keeps me busy for more than 1 month. I am trying to not rush the reading process as I want to digest all the concepts as much as possible. (I am pretty sure I still miss a lot though).

This book will bring you to the journey to, as the title is, the origin of time. Starting from the Big Bang, the evolution of physical laws, anthropic principles in the multiverse and how Stephen is against that principle (I am on Stephen's side before I read the book, and I am happy to discover that Stephen also shares the same view).

The goal of this book is to inform the reader of his new framework of physics, which bound dynamics, boundary conditions, and observership together into one. In this view, instead of searching for a final theory that describes the law of physics from a bottom-up approach (that is predicting the law of physics in the current time, through the evolutionary process from the beginning of time), he proposes that we should look them from a top-down view (that is tracing the law of physics back in time by our observation). The most remarkable new mindset that he proposes is, inspired by Everett's many world interpretations, our history is somewhat a superposition of multiple histories. We “create” our history by observation.

By this chapter, my brain is already smoking. But then, he continues to explore the concept of the holography principle (especially a duality between quantum mechanics and gravity), to understand the beginning of time itself. That is super interesting, but my mind is already melting. I need to stop reading every 5 or 10 pages, just to digest what is all about.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable journey. Thanks to the author who patiently wrote something that is extremely complicated and high-level concept of physics to be readable by non-physicists like me. Would love to hear more about Stephen's new top-down approach more in the future.