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

Holography tells us that there is an entity more basic than time—a hologram—from which the past emerges.

The chance outcomes at countless branching events infuse a genuinely emergent element into evolution. They add a vast amount of structure and information that simply isn’t contained in the lower-level laws,

Like Einstein, the early Hawking presumed that the mathematical laws of physics had some sort of existence that superseded the physical reality they governed.

Combining the various ingredients in their theory, string theorists found far more possible shapes of hidden dimensions than there are atoms in the observable universe. Each shape of space composes its own string symphony, describing a universe with its own specific set of effective laws.

What that final word is, however, depends on the questions the questioner asks and even on the order of the questions.

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

quantum cosmology

How come? Because the unobserved past in quantum mechanics exists as a spectrum of possibilities only—a wave function.

Even if the inflaton started out with the bare minimum level of jitters allowed for by the uncertainty principle, a burst of inflationary expansion would transform these into macroscopic wobbles, superimposing on the overall smoothness of the expanding universe a wavy pattern of variations in the field, much like ripples on the surface of an otherw