Brief Answers to the Big Questions

by Stephen Hawking

The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materialise out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called ‘negative energy’.

To help you get your head around this weird but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy. Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he’s not just making a hill – he’s also making a hole,

So where is all this negative energy today? It’s in the third ingredient in our cosmic cookbook: it’s in space.

The universe is like an enormous battery storing negative energy. The positive side of things – the mass and energy we see today – is like the hill. The corresponding hole, or negative side of things, is spread throughout space.

By the year 2600 the world’s population would be standing shoulder to shoulder and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red hot.

Each bit of information can be thought of as the answer to a yes/no question. For the first two billion years or so the rate of increase in complexity must have been of the order of one bit of information every hundred years.

not. This is why I don’t believe science fiction like Star Trek where people are essentially the same 350 years in the future. I think the human race, and its DNA, will increase its complexity quite rapidly.