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

by Thomas Hertog

Wheeler was fond of illustrating his vision with a variant of the twenty questions game. In this game, a group of colleagues are seated in a living room after dinner. One is sent out. In his absence, the rest decide to play the game with a twist: They agree not to settle on a definite word but to act as if they had agreed upon a word. When the questioner returns and poses his “yes/no” questions, each respondent answers as he pleases, with the one condition that his response should be compatible with all previous ones. So at each stage of the game, everyone in the room has in mind a word that is consistent with all the answers that have been given before. Naturally, successive questions rapidly narrow down the options until both the questioner and the respondents are taken by the hand, as it were, and guided toward a single word. What that final word is, however, depends on the questions the questioner asks and even on the order of the questions. In this variant of the game, Wheeler said, “No word is a word, until that word is promoted to reality by the choice of questions asked and answers given.”[18] In a similar way, a quantum universe constantly puts itself together, piece by piece, out of a haze of possibilities, somewhat like a forest emerging out of the fog on a damp gray morning. Its history is not how we usually think of history, as a sequence of one thing happening after another. Rather it is a marvelous synthesis that includes us and in which what unfolds now ret...