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

by Thomas Hertog

But observership also reaches into the past. When the Hawkingian oracle said that “the history of the universe depends on the question you ask,” I figured this is exactly what it meant. Stephen was saying that the entire collection of facts that characterize the universe around us, from the biosphere on Earth to the observed low-temperature effective laws of physics, constitutes in effect a grand question we ask of the cosmos. The triptych evokes the idea that this grand question retroactively draws into existence those few branches of cosmological history that have the properties that are being observed. That is, observership in quantum cosmology isn’t a mere afterthought or an anthropic post-selection principle acting in a giant preexisting multiverse, but an agency operating at a deeper level, an indispensable part of the continual process through which physical reality—and physical theory, we argue—come about. A quantum universe and observers emerge in sync, in a sense. The depth of the top-down philosophy that Stephen anticipated back in 2002—even though it took us many more years of thought experiments, dead alleys, and the occasional eureka moments before the mist cleared—is that cosmological theory and observership are bound together.