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

the entangled boundary bits play the role of observership.

Evolution continuously builds on an enormous chain of frozen accidents.

This is a general phenomenon. Symmetries of physical systems tend to get broken when the temperature falls, leading to richer structures and more room for complexity.

Whereas multiverse cosmology presumes the stable backdrop of an eternally inflating space in which everything happens, the no-boundary proposal holds that quantum mechanics becomes so fundamentally important in the very early universe that it washes out even that backdrop—the very fabric of spacetime.

leaving its biophilic character utterly mysterious and confusing.

reductionism versus emergence would appear too limited a way of looking at the world.

physical reality comes about in a two-step process.

What determines the ultimate boundary conditions at the origin of the universe?

If spacetime is a physical field, they argued, then shouldn’t we expect that it comes endowed with its own intrinsic properties? The cosmological constant does exactly that: It fills spacetime with energy and pressure.