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

by Thomas Hertog

As I just alluded to, this entangling imbues quantum cosmology with a subtle backward-in-time element. One doesn’t follow the universe from the bottom up—forward in time—because one no longer presumes the universe has an objective observer-independent history, with a definite starting point and evolution. Quite the contrary, built into the triptych is the counterintuitive idea that in some fundamental sense that I have yet to elaborate on, history at the very deepest level emerges backward in time. It is as if a constant flux of quantum acts of observation retroactively carves out the outcome of the big bang, from the number of dimensions that grow large to the types of forces and particles that arise. This renders the past contingent on the present, a further reduction of causality well beyond what even Bohr conceived.